School House Rock: Animated Educational Music Videos for Kids

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The Benefits of School House Rock: Animated Educational Music Videos for Kids

"As your body grows bigger, your mind must flower, it's great to learn, 'cause knowledge is power!" Any person in their twenties can tell you where this phrase comes from, and that is because every Saturday morning in between Saturday morning cartoons children would wait anxiously for a five minute break of School House Rock. Little did we know that while we were singing along to "Sufferin' Till Suffrage" we were learning a history lesson.

School House Rock is a compilation of animated educational music videos. They were developed by a man named David B. McCall back in the early seventies to teach children between the ages of 6 to 12 the basics in grammar, mathematics, history and science. There are over thirty of these music videos and about five were shown every Saturday morning in between breaks on the ABC Network. They ran for a period of eleven years, from 1973 to 1984, and were brought back by popular demand in 1989. Today the children who used to watch them religiously are now having their own children and this year all the videos were released out for sale to the public.

The reason these tapes are just as popular as they were twenty years ago is that children are more likely to learn if they are entertained at the same time. Now that these tapes have been released for a new generation of children, it is important that potential buyers see how good they are for kids. These tapes make any lesson easy. They base their way of teaching by repetition and even if you watch them only once, you are bound to pick up a thing or two.

The tapes are divided into four categories. Grammar Rock deals with parts of a sentence and their functions. Each song centers on a different part of speech, like nouns, adjectives, and conjunctions. Multiplication Rock only deals with multiplication up to the number nine, but it gives you hints to make it easier. History Rock teaches mostly early American history and Science Rock gives you little lessons in biology, earth science, physics, and astronomy.

The animation in these tapes is not very modern. They have the feeling of the seventies cartoons, with psychedelic colors and the children and adults' appearances are drawn to resemble that era.

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