Geography Songs for Everyone

I love music and geography.

Seven years ago I began writing educational music to help my young children learn their address, phone number, house rules and so on.

Three years ago a local private school asked me to write geography songs. This big project has been a joy and I am happy to share it with you.

I have these goals when writing geography songs:

1) Songs must be musically engaging and be inspired by the region highlighted. This allows for enjoyable, passive listening in the car or home.

2) Songs must sing the countries in the order they appear on a map. This allows the student to point to a map and move the finger to each country as its sung, as opposed to bouncing across the continent. This helps the student learn each country's relative position.

3) Lyrics are clearly understood, easy to sing, and offer context regarding the location of the region and/or its global significance. In addition to country names, this ensures that the listener will learn global position or distinguishing characteristics.

4) Songs ought to be filled with other geographical nuggets. I regularly insert general geographical terminology, ie. isthmus, and specific landmarks, ie, Lake Titicaca, to spark conversations.

5) Each song must not highlight more than ten countries. Most songs feature 5-8 countries, but no song features more than ten. To aid memorization, countries are divided and grouped into regions. For this reason, it takes 50 songs to cover the entire world.

My young children think its great and you bet they know their world geography!

MBA, Pepperdine University; BA International Management, minor in Spanish; Piano instruction 10+ years

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