Having spent a good while flicking between Youtube and Zamzar over the last couple of days, downloading and converting videos, I’ve had a chance to look over some of my ‘favourited’ videos once more, and came across this one.

I remember They Might Be Giants from their song Birdhouse in your soul – classic lyrics including ‘blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch who watches over you’ and ‘not to put too fine a point on it, say I’m the only bee in your bonnet’ – and It’s Istanbul not Constantinople – but here they are singing a song about the Alphabet of Nations. They cheat for X but otherwise a country for each letter.

I was thinking of using it as a challenge for European Day of Languages – some ideas:

• learning the song would be the simplest
• play the song each day for a week then have a quiz on countries
• name the languages spoken in the countries
• name the capital cities
• challenge pupils to label the countries on a map
• pupils rewrite the song with countries of their choice
• write a collaborative Alphabet of Languages – then learn a word in each language

Doesn’t have to be for EDL – it would be a good exercise for global awareness and ICU at any point.

There is an Animaniacs video naming countries too, but I prefer this one as it’s shorter, less dated (in terms of look and also countries that no longer exist) and also funkier. ;o)