My name is Matt Baron (M. Ed.). I’m a ten-year elementary public school teacher and the founder and songwriter of Future Hits, an educational rock band whose songs build important language skills while cultivating children’s love for learning. 

On a Friday afternoon during my first year teaching, a first grade teacher colleague of mine handed me her “long o” spelling list for the following week (words such as “boat,” “row,” “coat,” “snow”) and asked me to come up with a phonics lesson to teach her entire classroom that coming Monday. I gulped. How would I keep the attention of 30 kids? I was an ESL resource teacher who only worked with small groups of students whose native language is not English. As a first year teacher with no experience teaching a whole class, I decided to use my musical skills to engage the larger group. After a futile Google search for songs to teach about the “long o” vowel sound, I grabbed my guitar and, with the spelling list and a blank sheet of paper in front of me, I wrote the first Future Hits song (“Yellow Boat”) in minutes.

That next Monday, I played the song and it was a smash. Kids cheered and wanted to hear it again. The guitar commanded their attention. All thirty kids hung onto every lyric, their eyes open wide and their mouths trying to sing the words. Word about my songs and materials spread like wildfire to the other teachers, administration and parents; their enthusiasm motivated me to write more and more. I received more spelling lists from more teachers and kept writing songs. Soon I began creating worksheets for students to show their comprehension of each song’s lessons (which now incorporate social emotional themes as well as phonics). Kids yelled my name in the hallway when they saw me with my guitar in tow. Providing whole group lessons that engaged each classroom’s array of learners with differentiated activities and the lyrics projected on the big screen became a main event of the kids’ days as well as mine.  

Thus Future Hits, the fun, heartfelt and (secretly) educational rock band and curricula program, was born. Since 2011, our songs and educational materials have been used in hundreds of classrooms by thousands of students. Mario Rossero, former CPS Arts Director says, “The songs and activities are successfully designed to be accessible for all learners as well as attend to social emotional learning (SEL) needs in the process.” Each song is designed to develop important language skills while cultivating children’s love for learning. As a band, we’ve released three albums (two of which are bilingual in English and Spanish), one educational workbook, and have performed in locations as far and wide as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, the Galápagos Islands, China, and Norway.

Today, we serve classrooms with in-person and remote concerts with accompanying educational material designed for children in grades Pre-K through 3rd. Each song is tailored to develop literacy skills, increase English language fluency, and highlight Social Emotional Learning concepts in a fun, engaging way. The songs and curricula are differentiated, standards-aligned, and promote multi-modal demonstrations of learning. To see us in action, watch this short video.

We offer our services around the world via remote platforms and hope to connect with you and your students (or families learning at home) soon! Click here to schedule your visit today!