Song for Counting to 100

The above song I recommend to use to help with counting up to 100.  There are a few reasons I recommend this song which you can learn about below!

When working in the school districts as a music therapist, it is very common to have a student who is working on an counting objective.  There are hundreds and hundreds of songs and activities for counting to 10 or 20.  The selection of songs to work on counting past that is much fewer and many of the songs that exist out there are just too FAST.  

Most of the students I see have autism.  All of them are quite different, but some of them take longer to process auditory information.  In a post in my speech/language section, I talk about the steps our auditory system takes to take in and process sounds.  Just a review, to process one sound like the sound of letter "b," our brain has to:

1. Catch the sound
2. Learn the sound and how to recreate it
3. Sequence the sound(s) in the order heard
4. store it in memory
5. Tell muscles how to move and in what order to recreate it. 

This is all just to process one sound. Can you imagine what our brains go through to sequence all of the sounds in one word, let alone a sentence? 

Some children take much longer to process auditory information.  Perhaps their brain has a difficult time with one of these steps.  Music however, is wonderful because we can stretch out sounds and put emphasis on what the brain needs to learn better.  Music therapists often write songs to fit these needs. 

It is important for those writing songs to help children learn academic concepts to remember this information.  It is much better to write songs that are slower so that kids can hear all of the sounds in a word clearly and also write songs that have repetitive lyrics to help with memory. 

This song above by AJ Jenkins, is one of the slowest counting songs that goes all the way to 100 that I have found. It also does a little bit of place value at the end.  I recommend this song to help with counting concepts. 

Greg and Steve have a counting song from back when I was growing up, that goes to 20.  What is great about it, is that is has an echo for the kids to practice only a few numbers at a time.  They only have to memorize a few sounds at once instead of the whole song. 

As the music therapy community grows and learns about these needs, there will be more song options out there to help with these needs!