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I don't like children's music. It's nearly always synthesized music with high-pitched melodies and dumb lyrics. It takes as little skill to memorize as it takes to memorize the latest hip hop songs that are all chorus and no verse. However, the world occasionally throws you a little gem of a children's music album and your faith in the future of human kind is restored. Such a gem is the new science and astronomy-themed The Mighty Sky.
The Mighty Sky is the brainchild of songwriters Beth Nielsen Chapman, Annie Roboff, and the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory director Rocky Alvey. Each song has a a different genre, from country to blues and even a little rock. Each song also focuses on a different theme:
- Little Big Song: Talks about the size of space.
- Rockin’ Little Neutron Star: Talks about neutron stars, which are the remnants of stars that went supernova.
- Test, Re-test & Verify: Talks about the scientific method.
- The Big Bang Boom: Talks about the big bang, the expansion of our universe, and the creation of space and time.
- The Mighty Sky: A soft ballad about the sky.
- The Moon: Self-explanatory.
- The Way That We Lean: Talks about the Earth's axis.
- There is No Darkness: A soft comforting song for those afraid of the dark!
- You Can See the Blues: Talks about the electromagnetic spectrum.
- Zodiacal Zydeco: Talks about the ecliptic plane, or Zodiac, of the planets. And "zydeco", wow, talk about a great vocabulary word! (It's a genre of Southern American folk music, by the way. Yes, I had to look it up.)
- Through Hubble’s Eyes: Spoken word by Dr. C. R. O'Dell, scientist who worked on the Hubble telescope. We often hear that it takes eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach Earth, but O'Dell puts in perspective how long it takes for the light of other stars to reach us.
Some of my favorite excerpts from the lyrics:If the Sun was the size of a basketball
That would make the solar system small
The Earth would only be a grain of sand
You could hold the planets with one hand
*****
Her career was finished and her bright days were done
She’d been up on the stage she’d outshined the Sun
All the other stars said it’s time to move over
But man they got an eyeful when she went supernova
*****
The Moon looks big at rise and set
And smaller when it climbs up high
It’s the very same thing if you measure it
The Moon is good at fooling our eyes
*****
In summer Earth’s farther away from the Sun
In winter it’s closer they say
So distance just isn’t why you freeze your buns
Your hemisphere’s tilting away
*****
The electromagnetic spectrum, is making a lot of waves
You know that they go from radio, to energetic gamma rays
But you can see the blues, in all the visible hues
The colors of the rainbow, are the energies that we use
The Mighty Sky website includes samples of the songs and all the lyrics, so go check it out if you're curious about this album. The website will also soon include lesson plans themed around each song, but for now The Mighty Sky team has provided me with some sample lesson plans to share with you about the moon phases and sunlight timeline.
Our Curious George obsessed two-year-old is now requesting to "dance" (listen to The Might Sky) over watching Curious George on TV, which is kind of a big deal. The whole family has listened to this album countless times already and we simply haven't gotten bored or annoyed with it. I don't think singing along about the scientific method will ever get old.
