Music can change a bad day to good and a good day to great. It’s funny how powerful music can be when it comes to giving us a boost of energy or helping us relax.

But the power of music goes deeper than energizing or setting a mood. Music has been proven to have incredible benefits as a teaching tool, especially for struggling students.

On May 21, the Today show reported on the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas — an exciting, New York-based orchestra whose director, Alondra de la Parra, is passionate about bringing music to the children of the world. “There’s just about every important value that a child can learn in music,” she said in an interview. “Teamwork, respect for one another, imagination, discipline.” Music, de la Parra said, “has nothing to do with where we came from, how old we are, what our political views are… nothing! It’s just ‘let’s do something beautiful together.’”

That is a great reason why music makes such a powerful educational tool. When students learn a song together, it doesn’t matter what language they speak. Music crosses boundaries, so every student can understand. As Eric Jensen wrote in Teaching with the Brain in Mind (1998), “Music is a language.”

In the same book, Jensen also wrote that music is “a carrier of words, primer for brain activity. “ If you think about it, music really is a sort of glue. I still remember jingles I heard on TV when I was five years old, and I bet most of you do, too! That same kind of sticking power applies to educational songs as well. Consider early literacy. Most children learn the English alphabet by singing the alphabet song—something most people remember all of their lives. Music has also been found as an effective tool for building literacy skills in English learners. In the article “The Effect of Music on Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition,” published in 1993, Suzanne L. Medina reported that her studies showed music to be an effective tool for building vocabulary in a second language, especially when that music was accompanied by illustrations.

One of the most powerful features in Imagine Learning English is the "Recording Studio" activity. In this activity, students listen to songs and chants that teach literacy or grammar rules and then sing along with the song or chant to make a recording. Then, students can listen to their recording to see how they sounded. The best part is that while they’re playing rock star, students are also learning important skills such as pronoun usage and how to use multi-meaning words. Thanks to the sticking-power of music, those skills will be stuck in their head for a long time.

Music is a profoundly powerful tool. It can unlock many doors for children and open them up to a lifetime of success. As Alondra de la Parra said in her interview, “If [children] can imagine something, they can get it out and make it a reality. And that is a perfect example of a tool that can help them for a lifetime.”

To learn more about how Imagine Learning can help English Learner students gain lifelong skills through the power of music, go here.

English Learners