FEATURE: MUSIC & THE PERFORMING ARTS
Teaching English through the medium of pop music
quarter of 2022. These videos cover every vocabulary, word, and grammar structure that primary-aged children are expected to learn between 5 and 12 years of age. A big USP for ELT Songs is that the syllabus is mapped to the Cambridge English: Young Learners curriculum. This means that children can use the content to prepare for their most important pre-A1, A1, and A2 language learning certificates. Jake set up ELT Songs to provide children with
alternative and accessible resources when it comes to learning. Reflecting on his own schooling experience, and believing that education shouldn’t be limited by tradition, Jake stated: “During my school years I was admittedly one of those students that spent more time staring out of the window daydreaming about becoming a glamorous pop star, as opposed to attentively listening to my teachers’ words of wisdom. I was very much a visual learner with a short attention span. The periodic table went straight over my head, maths felt like rocket science and consequently, I failed each and every one of my GCSE’s with the exception of music. On the other hand, I was perfectly capable of
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n our first feature looking at music and the performing arts this month, we profile ELT
Song's founder Jake Carter. With a degree from the famous Brit School of Performing Arts, Jake has experience as a signed singer- songwriter, artist manager, and music producer. On the educational front, he has years of experience working with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press & the British Council.
ELT Songs stands for Experience Learning Through Songs and lives within Jake’s own
PlanetPop.com platform. It is set to become the Netflix of education and has 350 exceptional graded learning videos already uploaded, with the company on course for 800+ videos by the third
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www.education-today.co.uk November 2021
reciting every word from my favourite Snoop Doggy Dog rap or Michael Jackson song by the age of 6! My father was in a relatively famous rock band called Mr Big, which gave me the drive
and courage to open a school assembly whilst playing the guitar and singing my favourite Jimi Hendrix song by the age of 12. As time passed by, I started to question why
the education system had failed me. I’m left- handed, a right-brain thinker, non-academic, dyslexic, highly creative, a daydreamer, and insatiably ambitious.” Following a rather rocky education, Jake went
whole-heartedly into the music industry as a singer-songwriter, a music producer, and then a record company founder, raising substantial amounts of capital to sign and launch artists. When the music industry hit a significant downturn in 2010, just as his son was born, he was forced to look outside the box for alternative ways of making a living. Soon enough, Jake found himself writing nursery rhymes for educational publishers, which “at the time was a harsh pill to swallow, given [his] previous aspirations of becoming the next best thing since Prince and Michael Jackson.” As with most things in life, with every hardship,
there is a little gift that follows shortly after and without recognising it at the time, Jake slowly began developing a very unique set of stacking skills. It was the art of mastering music production and songwriting coupled with understanding education for kids, corporate infrastructures,
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