Memorizing With Music

Last week I played Yakko's "Nations of the World" on YouTube for Autumn to watch, and after watching it a few times (and a 3 year old who could recite the whole song) we decided that we should be able to memorize it as well. We wrote down all of the lyrics, and then staring at the long list of countries it looked like it was going to be an impossible task. But, we found a YouTube video that played the song in slow motion and  another one that displayed the lyrics on the screen and we began to sing it over and over with the video. Then we moved on to singing it during bike rides and hikes. After a week of singing everywhere we went, Autumn and I have finally mastered the entire song, and Alaina has already learned most of it just by listening to us. This is a perfect example of the power of music to help us memorize difficult things. Learning with this song made the process of studying the map far more enjoyable, and even though it was still a challenge and took practice, the practice was less work.
We learned, and are still learning, so many things about geography from studying this song.
We are now moving on to the next part of the challenge: seeing who can identify all of the countries on the map the fastest while singing the song. Then we are going to move to labeling the countries on a blank map. Hopefully by the time we end our study we will feel confident in our knowledge of world geography. But, we already feel much more confident after meeting this challenge. Learning this song is well worth the effort, and we recommend you try it as well! Below are a few videos that might help you.

                                      
 Here is a video of Autumn singing the "Nations of the World":

Here is a slow motion video of Yakko singing. If you want to learn the "Nations of the World" song like we did then we highly recommend using this video:

Here is the other video that we used with the lyrics on the screen: