Recommended for pre-K-3, Tune Up to Literacy encourages literacy using original songs by composer/lyricist/educator Dr. Al Balkin, former Western Michigan Professor and composer who wrote music for The Hobbit as well as several off-Broadway children’s musicals. Produced by ITV with ETV, the programs musically introduce and reinforce concepts such as punctuation and sentence construction. In this episode, the song, presented in musical setting of an Irish jig, explains that a consonant can be almost any letter you see except an A, an I, an O, a U, or an E. Those are vowels that consonants keep company.

Originally released by SOUTH CAROLINA ETV NETWORK, 2010. Streaming video file encoded with permission for digital streaming by Infobase on June 09, 2015.

What's a Consonant, What's a Vowel?: Tune Up to Literacy (1:24);.