Teaching Through Song 🎵

I recall when I was a young lad, there were certain songs I listened to more than enough to become engrained in my memory. Many of these ended up containing information that I made good use of throughout my life by singing the song in my head to extract a useful piece of information from it. In addition to this useful information, many of these songs were handy to sing as party tricks or to annoy people.

Now that my kids are young lads and lady, I figure it makes sense to expose them to a few of these nerdy songs to encourage a bit of education while enjoying a few fine tunes.

Plus, I can't think of a better way to engrain information into a human's brain than through song. How would any of us have ever learned the alphabet without song?

Table of Contents

Animaniacs
Skunk Bear
"Weird Al" Yankovic
They Might Be Giants
Sesame Street
And More!

Animaniacs

Two of the most annoying and most useful songs (from a fact recall perspective) that I learned in my youth are the Animaniac's songs about all the countries in the world ("Yakko's World") and all the US states and their capitals ("Wakko's America").

There are a couple others by the Animaniacs that are also useful in certain situations. This one I sing to my kids when they are working on multiplication homework and ask for help:

And this one I sing to my younger kids when I'm putting them to bed as my standard go-to lullaby (I sing it a bit slower, and try to convert it to metric):

They also have a, somewhat less useful, song listing out all the US presidents (at least up to Clinton):

Wait, what? There are new episodes of Animaniacs??

Skunk Bear

This week, for whatever reason, I decided to look up the musician of a song I've had in my music library for a few years, that is pure nerdy comedy gold. I'm still working on helping my kids gain a deep enough understanding of physiology (and love) to appreciate all its nerdy quips but I'm VERY sure this song will come in super handy when they are pre-teens and especially teenagers. ...