Musical activities for enhancing number concepts in preschool children

Abstract

A concept is the basic unit of all types of learning. Young children generally form concepts through the use of senses. Number concept is defined by McIntosh et al. (1992), as a person’s general understanding of numbers and operations. Research studies suggest that children construct basic number and arithmetic concepts gradually from experiences that involve numbers and difficulties in counting might hinder in mathematical progress (Baroody and Coslick, 1998). Therefore, attention should be given to assess and understand the number concepts formed during preschool age. Music is considered to play an important role in stimulating young children in learning. Hetland (2000) described that using songs and different music components can help in teaching numbers because of the high association between music and spatial-temporal reasoning skills. The study was carried out on twenty four numbers of pre-school children belonging to the age of 3- 4 years, selected through purposive sampling method. Pre and post-intervention design was used to assess the influence of musical activities on the development of number concepts in children. The number concepts were assessed in the categories of Number sense, Number representation and Number relation based on the principles of counting proposed by Gelman and Galistell (1978). It was found from the study that most children could name numbers but the concept of cardinality was not attained by many of the children. Findings revealed that children improved in all the areas of number concepts after the musical intervention. However, it was also observed that all the concepts are not mastered at the same time by all the children.