Hum a few bars...

For the last few days, I've had several They Might Be Giants songs repeating in my brain. They're there when I wake up, there as I'm playing Legos with the boys, there in the car. (At least the actual CD is in the car too, so I can drive out one song with one of the others.)

All our current favorites are from their newest CD, "Here Comes Science." The CD comes with a fabulous DVD of the same songs, animated in a variety of styles. (We bought it at a local bookstore, but it's also available from iTunes. Not sure how iTunes handles the video component.)

The addition of video is great for us, because it provides two different ways to remember the lyrics, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's having a song stuck in my head and having to hum-tiddle-um-tum half the lyrics because I don't actually know them.

All the songs are great, but the boys' most-requested favorites are:

• "Roy G. Biv" -- a catchy tune about the spectrum of light.
• "The Bloodmobile" -- especially the bit about the white blood cells being soldiers who fight infectious germs.
• "Electric Car" -- a melodic number with a cute video of forest and farm animals being driven around in no-emissions vehicles.
  
• "What Is a Shooting Star?" -- Adrian requests this one be sung at bedtime, and since it's in part a "round", it's good practice for his musical ear. Note: It's hard to sing a "round" with a sleepy 5-year-old.
• "What Does the Sun Shine?" and the next one in order, "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" -- both of which have great lyrics. The first one goes on about "The sun is a mass / Of incandescent gas / A gigantic nuclear furnace..." and the second one challenges, "The sun is a miasma / Of incandescent plasma / Forget what you've been told in the past..." Gotta love a self-referencing children's album.
  

I so agree with the theories that singing information can make it more memorable and digestible. And if this album had been available when I was a child, I would have loved it as much as our boys do now. I didn't learn that the sun is about 93,000,000 miles away from earth until this year, but I won't forget it now! I didn't realize that learning about photosynthesis could be engaging and fun! Or that elephants are mostly made of four elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen)!

With this science CD following the 1-2-3s and A-B-Cs albums, who knows what's next for TMBG... but if they cover history or literature, I'm going to buy them, memorize them, and then go back in time and re-take that 8th grade final exam.