Elwood Third Graders Hone Their Math Skills With 'Mozart Math'

Third graders at James H. Boyd Intermediate School in the Elwood Union Free School District participated in a videoconference experience with the Cleveland Institute of Music called “Mozart Math”

Students participated in 40-minute sessions that focused on the life and musical compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The students in Liz Held and Beth Noon’s classes created a human timeline of events in Mozart’s life including his birth, when he began composing music, his marriage and his death. After constructing the timeline, students calculated math problems to reveal Mozart’s age at the time of milestone events in his life.

The students also listened to various compositions by Mozart, learned to count beats and created a bar graph of the number of beats in each piece of music performed by the students at the Cleveland Institute of Music. While listening to the music, students tried to guess the different instruments in the piece as well as the total number of instruments being played.

“The students enjoyed the program and did a wonderful job performing the math equations and identifying the instruments,” said district technology specialist Krista Albrecht.

Photo courtesy of the Elwood Union Free School District: Third-grade students at James H. Boyd Intermediate School create a human timeline of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’ life and musical compositions.