IN THE CLASSROOM:Finding music in math

In Leslie Montejano’s class at Newport Coast Elementary School, students are combining one of the newest art forms in the world with one of the oldest.

Recently, Montejano received a grant from the California Technology Assistance Project to provide her entire class with iPods — handheld devices that play music or movies — and she cooked up a complex assignment to go with them. Last week, her students created songs about multiplication problems, set them to the tune of classic nursery rhymes and filmed themselves singing on digital cameras.

In one package, then, it was music, poetry and technology — and it may have made their next math test easier. Montejano provided her students with 24 math problems and assigned each student to write at least one song. To the tune of “London Bridge,” 8-year-old Kayhon Rabbani came up with:

3 times 7 is 21, 21, 21Jenny Conde, 8, put a new twist on “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”:

3 times 7 is 21,

Now we’re all done

My math facts I do adore“Those are ones they can’t just do repeated addition for, so they have to memorize,” Montejano said.

3 times 8 is 24

On Friday, the class filmed its first video, with Yeonjae You leading four classmates in mathematical variations on “Old MacDonald” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” As the students sang and 8-year-old Blake Kormos manned the digital camera, representatives from the Assistance Project stood nearby observing the proceedings. Each year, the nonprofit organization holds a showcase of students making use of its grants.

After filming the songs, Montejano’s students planned to transfer them to the iMovie program on computers, then upload the short movies onto iPods. The class uses the handheld devices for other activities as well; some students have recorded classroom lectures on them or watched films for social studies.

Each of the math movies was expected to be less than one minute, but the students still got to put on a show. Yeonjae considered recording her “Old MacDonald” song with farm costumes and props, while 9-year-old Olivia Spearman, who transferred “This Old Man” into “9 times 9,” gave herself a much tougher task.

“I might dress up like an old man,” she said.