When an adult hears the phrase “maths in preschool”, the image that often appears in the head is of a child hunched over a workbook with tasks like “count the bears and circle the right number”. And then the parent comes to a session in the Skrzaty group (the name of one of our younger groups, meaning “the Pixies”) and finds a group of children who, with songs on their lips, clap specific rhythmic patterns, hop on every second beat, arrange themselves in fives, in threes, in pairs — and no one has any workbook in their hands. The parent’s first thought usually is: “And where is the maths in all this?” The second, after ten minutes of watching: “And yet…”.
Music-and-movement activities are one of the most thoughtfully designed methods of working with younger groups in our preschool. They look like pure fun. In reality they are a precisely designed tool which simultaneously builds a whole set of competences — and competences that cannot be built with the same effectiveness in any other way.
Where the idea of teaching maths through music came from
The idea is not ours. The combination of music, movement and learning has more than a century of tradition in pedagogy and at least three great methodological schools, to which all music-pedagogues today owe their craft.
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss educator from the early twentieth century, was the first systematically to demonstrate that a child learns rhythm and abstract concepts with the body before understanding them with the head. The eurhythmics he created consists in translating music into movement — the pupil is to “dance” what they hear. This seemingly trivial practice turned out to be revolutionary, because it introduced into music education something we today call embodied learning.
Carl Orff, a German composer and educator, went even further, combining music, movement, speech and play on simple percussion instruments into a single, coherent system. Every child in the Orff method simultaneously sings, claps, stomps, plays a drum — and it is precisely in this multidimensional activity that neural networks are formed which then serve to learn anything, including mathematics.
Zoltán Kodály, a Hungarian composer, created a method in which the child learns to count precisely through song and rhythm — counting syllables, dividing the bar, arranging melody into numerical structures. Children in Hungarian schools taught with the Kodály method traditionally achieved excellent results not only in music but also in mathematics, which fascinated educators worldwide for decades.
In our work with the Skrzaty we draw on all three schools — and on more recent research into the neurological structure of learning. Because what Dalcroze, Orff and Kodály saw intuitively has today been confirmed by brain imaging and developmental psychology.
Why the child’s brain responds so well to the combination of numbers and rhythm
The brain learns best when several areas are activated at the same time. When a child simply counts on their fingers, mainly the motor cortex and the regions responsible for number representation are at work. When the child counts while clapping — the auditory cortex, the rhythm centres, and the cerebellum (responsible for movement precision) join in. When in addition the child sings the digits in melody — the language and music centres are engaged. When they jump on every even number — the entire body’s coordination, spatial memory and balance come into play.
Each of these areas codes the same information (the number) in a slightly different way. A brain which receives the same information through several channels writes it down more deeply and more stably than a brain that receives it through just one. This is the principle we today call multimodal learning, and the effects of which can be seen in the child in a very simple result: after half a year of activities, the Skrzaty don’t only count to ten brilliantly, but understand what that number is — because they touched it with their bodies, heard it, saw it, sang it.
The second thing that the combination of music, movement and maths gives is a strong emotional engagement. The brain of a child who is having a great time releases more dopamine and noradrenaline — neurotransmitters responsible, among other things, for the consolidation of memory. That is why a child who “played at maths” often remembers more than a child who “studied maths”. Pleasure is not a bonus to the learning process — it is its fuel.
What we concretely do with the Skrzaty
In the daily life of our preschool group, music and maths meet in a great variety of configurations. A few examples, to give an idea of what this looks like backstage.
Clapping rhythmic patterns. The simplest play in the world, but the foundation of everything. The teacher claps: three times fast, once slow. The Skrzaty repeat. The teacher claps four times. They repeat. We gradually introduce more complex patterns. A child who claps after the teacher unconsciously counts beats, identifies groups, distinguishes tempo. These are exactly the same mental operations that will later appear in subtraction and division — only the child is training them in rhythm, not in a workbook.
Counting in song. We have a whole library of counting songs. Some are traditional, some we make up ourselves to fit the group’s needs. Each of these songs has one feature in common: numbers appear in it at a specific tempo, in a specific rhythm, in a specific melody. The child does not memorise the numbers as abstractions — they memorise them as sounds rooted in rhythm and melody. Half a year later, when the child sees the digit “5” on a card, their brain immediately activates a whole web of associations: the song in which we counted to five, the dance in which we formed groups of five, the pattern of clapping in fives. This is dense knowledge — something an adult would find hard to reproduce in front of a screen, but which comes naturally to a child.
Maths in space. The teacher says: “form three rows of four people”. The children must simultaneously count (four!), orient themselves in space (where is my row?), cooperate (a friend is also trying to find their place, we need to talk it through). This task, which on paper would look like pure multiplication tables, in the room becomes a play of grouping and arranging bodies in space.
Rhythmisation of mathematical operations. “How many fingers do you have on one hand?” The children clap one by one: one-two-three-four-five. “And on two?” And they immediately start clapping ten times in rhythm, twice as fast, in the right pattern. Addition becomes a sequence of beats. For the brain of a four-year-old this is faster, simpler and far more comprehensible than the adult notation “5 + 5 = 10”.
Spatial-orientation games. “Two steps forward, one backward, turn right.” These short sequences are pure arithmetic and orientation in space at once. A child who does such an exercise ten times a week develops directional concepts (front, back, right, left) and at the same time operates with numbers (two, one), which they encode through movement.
A bonus — the language gain
The owner wrote in the description of her recording one more thing worth noting: rhythm, melody and movement also support the development of language competences. This is not a decorative addition — it is a fact confirmed by research.
A brain that practises the structure of rhythm simultaneously practises the structure of a sentence. The syllable in a word is the functional equivalent of a beat in a bar. A child who from the youngest years regularly claps rhythms divides words into syllables better (and therefore has a stronger basis for learning to read). A child who sings in a group has a larger vocabulary than a peer who does not sing. A child who links a word with a gesture more often and more quickly reproduces it in spontaneous speech.
That is why, with us, the music-and-movement classes are not a separate “subject” — neither mathematical nor linguistic nor musical — but all of these things at once. A child’s development at this age happens holistically, in many dimensions at once, and a method that works with this development must also be multidimensional.
What a parent can do at home
The simplest answers usually work best:
— Sing together. Anything. In the car, while washing hands, while walking up the stairs. Let the child count the steps as they go, clap every other step, sing as they put on their shoes. Each such moment is a mini-training for the brain that is right then forging neural networks responsible for counting and speech.
— Dance. Put on music with a clear rhythm and, together with the child, jump on specific beats. “We jump only when the snare drum sounds” — that is mathematics, coordination, listening and information selection in one.
— Count movement. “Three steps to the right, five steps to the left, two jumps, one turn.” The child understands such a sequence immediately and learns it more pleasantly than any numbers on cards.
— Clap syllables. If the child has a long word to learn — crocodile, dinosaur, woodlouse — let them clap on each syllable. Two benefits at once: better memorisation of the word and a hidden exercise of phonological awareness, which they will need in learning to read.
— Don’t worry about “real” maths. There really is no need to teach a child digits before time, or to do formal exercises with them. All the maths a child needs at this stage fits into a song, a jump, a clap and a conversation about what you have more of and what less of.
The most important message
A child who, through the first two years of preschool, every day claps, sings, dances and counts in the rhythm of music, enters the next stages of education with something no one will ever take away: a deep, embodied understanding of number, structure, sequence and order. Not with the ability to write the digit “7” in a workbook — because that is a surface skill, and every child will master it eventually — but with a feel for mathematics. And this is the foundation on which one can later build literally anything: from arithmetic to geometry, from music to programming.
So when at an afternoon meeting you hear that the Skrzaty “had fun with songs”, please remember that this is not an ordinary fun. It is one of the most advanced and most effective methods of learning that we know.
It happens to bring great joy along the way — but that is the bonus. The most important thing is the work being done at that time by the brains of our children.