Lyrical Learning . . .

We are happy to announce that materials for our first volume have been updated and are available as a free download.

When I originally wrote the songs for the first of three life science volumes, I decided not to get into too much detail about cell organelles. Instead, I included only the cell structures important in classifying living organisms into the five kingdoms, namely the presence or absence of a nucleus, cell wall, and chloroplasts. I figured that if I started in on the rest of them—ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, etc.— then I’d have to cover them all. However, since writing the original songs, I’ve had requests to write a song about all the cell organelles, as students have been expected to learn about them at younger and younger ages. I finally did, and it was harder than I thought it would be! This is one of those challenging content-rich songs that I’m hoping kids have fun learning, as they do with tongue twisters. It’s a mouth-full! Bobby Horton recorded “Cell Organelles” (written to the old Irish tune “Gary Owen”—the score for which can be found on-line), and now I hope you have fun learning a bit about cell biology! I didn’t change the chapter in the text much, as I didn’t want to write a whole additional chapter about the functions and interactions of all the organelles, but I did make workbook pages for the new song.

The other revision I wanted to make had to do with biological classification: I include in Part 1 a change in the big groupings with the addition of three domains, one of which is then divided into kingdoms; and in Part 2 changes in what had been the kingdom Protozoa (Protista). I also wrote a new song (as well as text and workbook pages) about Protists as they are currently classified. This meant redoing the chapter “Protozoa” as well as the first part of the chapter “Algae, Fungi, and Non-vascular Plants” since some of what had been in the kingdom of plants (particularly algae) and in the kingdom of fungi (several molds and mildews) have been reclassified as protists. I didn’t want to totally replace the songs for those two chapters because I really like how Bobby Horton produced and recorded them. But I felt the content needed to be updated.