Math can be incredibly difficult. It’s all about rules, formulas and steps. As if learning those concepts isn’t tough enough, Math seems to have a language all its own. Younger students struggle with how to put it to use. To help students recall and use this, Jenny Savage created songs, poems, art and dances to aid them as they were working.

The difficult Math standards that they faced were not nearly as overwhelming when they could at least recall a song or dance pertaining to the primary vocabulary in the question. Many times, they could even sing through the steps on how to work through a problem. Jenny was able to see the stress melt away as they used the tools they had learned.

As they worked, words such as circumference and scalene were no longer foreign. They simply queued up songs in their minds. For example, if the word scalene was used, they would be hearing the tune to “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, but in their minds, they heard the words, “Scalene, scalene, scalene, scalene...none of your sides or angles are equal scalene.” They could imagine dancing and shaking their booty two places to the left or right if they were making a decimal into a percent or vice versa. Using arts, she gave life and fun to Math.

The subject of Math is ordinarily a challenging subject for many students, but for students that missed so much during the Covid-19 shut down it has been overwhelming. It was Jenny’s intention to bring life, color, music and fun to a subject and help students overcome their challenges as painlessly as possible.