Becky Taylor

Taylor's program idea, "Making Music to Master Mathematics", combines music and mathematics to improve students' abilities to visualize objects and changing patterns. During weekly center time, each of the students in the second grade will work on a computer that uses software containing specific music skills geared toward enhancing the math curriculum. Just as rhythm and tempo are basic building blocks in music education, so is patterning in mathematics. The music teacher, along with colleagues in other second-grade classrooms, will work together to develop joint activities connecting music and math lessons as added encouragement for students to think in pictures and visualize objects and patterns as they change in space over time. At the end of the school year, students will be able to distinguish various patterns more readily with the correlation shown between musical rhythms and tempos to mathematical patterns. Taylor resides in Fence, WI.