More often than not, music is thought of as a form of entertainment. Feeling bored? Put on your favorite album and kick back. Want to go out for a night on the town? Get a friend and couple of concert tickets and you’re in for a fabulous night. But music has more than one advantage to it. Another, of course, is that it can be a tool for education.
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Indeed, teachers have been using songs to educate their students for years. Here below, we will dive into five such songs. Tunes that can put a smile on a young person’s face as well as show them a thing or two about the world.
[RELATED: Behind the Hard Working Nursery Rhyme “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe”]
“The ABCs”
This song is an obvious one, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t make it any less important or useful. This tune teaches the building blocks of language but elucidating to children early on all the letters that comprise the alphabet. From A-to-Z (with the fan favorite L-M-N-O), “The ABCs” is as important a learning tool as a chalkboard.
“Old MacDonald Had a Farm”
We go from letters to animals. We live in a big world and it’s full of other creatures besides ourselves. And for us to keep it that way, as well as learn what makes them special, this song is an important one. What animals live on a farm and what do they sound like? Of course, you don’t have to just keep it to cows, chickens and ducks. Maybe your farm has dinosaurs or dolphins, snakes or lions. Be creative and have fun!
“The Wheels on the Bus”
This song isn’t about numbers or letters, but it is about a thing that kids see and experience often: the school bus. But the song gets even more granular than that. It teaches children that a bus is made up of different parts. It’s not just one big entity—rather, it’s the wheels, the windshield wipers, the horn, the lights and every other aspect. Things, in this way, don’t just exist, but they are (and can be) built or assembled. That’s important to learn.
“One, Two, Buckle My Shoe”
This song helps with counting, showing children successive numbers. From one and two all the way up to 10, the song teaches young children how to count and assigns objects to the digits. Numbers, like letters, are crucial building blocks for kids to understand early on. This song helps with that task.
“Itsy Bitsy Spider”
This fun song has a bit of a dance that goes along with it and while the tune doesn’t necessarily talk about any fundamental building block, it’s hand-based dance teaches the value of hand-eye coordination. It gets kids out of their seats and thinking about creatures smaller than themselves and it helps their hands and fingers move in unison. It’s subtle, but helpful, to be sure.
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