Salisbury Academy had a great surprise when Dr. Rob took advantage of the nice weather to do a music lesson outside. With "Love of Country" being this month's character trait for our school, Dr. Rob planned to teach patriotic music to the lower school. However, when the nice weather inspired him to sing outside, he then decided to take it several steps further thinking, "Why not blend our music with physical activity and a small dose of math? I mean, if mixing music with exercise and mathematics was good enough for the ancient Greeks, why not Salisbury Academy music students?" 

This notion fit right in with Dr. Rob's philosophy of cross-curricular education and letting students experience connections. In the lesson, the entire class sang the patriotic song "Yankee Doodle Boy" while one student ran the length of the basketball ball court back and forth. With Dr. Rob's nearly-perfect inner metronome keeping the tempo of the song the same for each student's run, the students were practically able to pace their running without a stopwatch and, in relation to the music, estimate how long it took to run one length of the blacktop. 

With the fourth-graders, the average "good" run was six lengths of the court per one complete verse of the song. The next step was for the class to follow up on the lesson by timing how long the song was at that certain tempo and then do a little math to determine 1/6th of that time, which revealed the precise time it took to run one length of the blacktop. A residual or secondary outcome of this lesson was to show students how music may be used as a tool of synchronization, such as the precision timing of music within film soundtracks. And, what if the tempo of "Yankee Doodle Boy" had been taken, say, 50% faster? How many lengths would be possible to run during that time? The benefits of cross-curricular lessons are limitless!