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When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Zaret's main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic "Unchained >Melody" for the 1955 movie "Unchained", later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in "Ghost". Three of the albums (the best three in my opinion) were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself (he wrote "On Top of Spaghetti").

The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.

In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents' basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps (about half a megabyte each) or 160 Kbps (about two megabytes each). The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.

www.acme.com/singing_science - Preview

Science music fun activity retro

The message of the day, that you can achieve what you aspire to achieve, is not news to him, but he says the way it was presented was entirely different. "They did it with music and it was . . . wow," he states. "This is the first time in three years here I've seen anything like this." Then he smiles widely and adds, as though he invented the idea, "You learn better when you're having fun."

www.edutopia.org/-subs-substitute-teachers-arts - Preview

music underserved