The Power of Songs for Memorization

No matter what subject you teach, using singing and music to help students remember material can be one of the most powerful tools in your teaching toolkit. Math teachers use “Pop! Goes the Weasel” to help students remember the quadratic formula. English teachers use “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to teach the various forms of ‘to be.’ And in Social Studies…well, let’s look at an example. I was recently talking about memorization with my kung fu teacher, who’s a few years younger than me, and he had a great story about using music as a memory strategy. When he was in high school, he had a tough assignment – to memorize the Constitution. He studied it every night, but just couldn’t seem to get it into his head.

One day, he was talking about this assignment at lunch, when a girl jumped in and asked him if he’d tried using the song. It turned out that she’d seen Schoolhouse Rock on a Saturday morning cartoon, and the show had a song for the Constitution. Soon word got out to all the students in the class about the song from Schoolhouse Rock – and all of the students passed the assignment. The teacher was flabbergasted – he’d never seen a class where every student was able to memorize the Constitution. The funniest thing to me was when my kung fu teacher started singing the song on the spot; 20 years later, he still remembered it. Talk about learning!

As teachers, we absolutely must use every tool we have available to us, and music is one of the most powerful strategies we can utilize. You don’t have to be a Broadway star to help your students use music and singing in the classroom. Whether you teach them a song for the multiplication tables or have them make up lyrics for karaoke that are relevant to your unit, by attaching something new to something the kids already know, they’ll learn.

See Also:

1. Hit Tunes from Real Teachers
2. Music as a Behavior Management Strategy
3. Transition With Song