When Chicago Public Schools bilingual teacher Matt Baron searched for songs to help teach his students, he wasn’t too impressed with the options he found. Solution? He started writing his own.

Baron has applied his backgrounds in music and teaching to write more than 40 songs over the past year-and-a-half. Each one is designed to teach grammar or vocabulary, plus a “life lesson” of sorts.

Earlier this year, Baron’s band, Future Hits, released a CD featuring some of the top classroom hits. It’s called Songs for Learning.

You can hear Future Hits play free Monday and again on Wednesday at Millennium Park’s Family Fun Festival. But first, Baron came to Eight Forty-Eight with band mates Emma Hospelhorn and Ben Sutherland to play some tunes and explain the lessons behind them.