Italian + Music + Teaching = Winning Content for Frank Moyo
His videos have millions of views and have been shared by actors Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Now social media star Frank Moyo is one of 21 creatives selected for the Canada Media Fund’s Digital Creators Pilot Program. The singing teacher explains why he makes videos that teach kids Italian, and how the money may help take his content to the next level
Frank Moyo’s Italian roots run deep. His parents and grandparents immigrated from Calabria, in Southern Italy, to Canada in the early 1970s. Moyo was born in 1993 and grew up immersed in Italian culture and language. He was close to his grandparents, especially his maternal grandmother, whom he calls Nonna. “I was speaking Italian when I was a kid and grew up eating Italian,” he says.
When he was 11, young Moyo developed an interest in music. “I saw a guitar in the window and asked my dad for it for Christmas,” he says. “It’s a cliché story, but it's true, I promise.” He started writing music and developed his skills as a singer-songwriter while studying Italian and archeology at the University of Toronto, followed by a stint at teachers’ college.
Moyo has been a music teacher since 2018, working at two primary schools in Toronto. But it wasn’t until six years into his teaching career, around 2024, that he started merging three of his passions: music, teaching and Italian. He soon added a fourth passion to that list, content creation, posting as @frankmoyomusic to a million Instagram followers and as @FrankMoyo on YouTube.
The Birth of a Digital Content Creator
While he’d sung in Italian before, mostly covers, Moyo was inspired by how some language teachers use beats to help with pronunciation. “I kind of did it based on rhythm,” he says, using the word “parmigiano” as an example. He breaks the word down by its syllables, then works it into a beat. “Then we put it to a song,” he explains.
He treated learning Italian as an icebreaker for music students to do something new together. “They were less shy and less worried about judgment as they were all learning together,” Moyo says.
Moyo wrote what he calls “The Cheese Song” and sang it for a Grade 2 class, propping his phone up on a projector stand. He wanted to capture video of his performance and post it online so that more people could learn from it. It was one of the first Italian instruction songs he posted on his Instagram account, and it became a viral success.
“It got 15 million views within the first week or two,” he recalls. “It was reposted by Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Love Hewitt and all these huge A-list people. I think it was just something really brand new and no one else was doing anything like it.”
Moyo’s Popularity Grows
Moyo continued to write Italian educational songs, singing them for his classes then uploading them online. First came “The Pasta Song,” then a song about how to express your love in Italian, along with songs about fruits, vegetables and colours. The songs were a hit in and outside of school. “The Buongiorno Song,” which introduced different Italian greetings, hit 12 million views. “Parents would come to school and say how much they loved the songs and how their kids were singing them all day and night,” Moyo says.
Seeing the potential for his songs to become something more, Moyo made a shift from Instagram to YouTube. He worked with an editor to create videos and thumbnails reminiscent of popular educational channels like Ms. Rachel and Super Simple Songs.
Then, another big breakthrough for Moyo — a song that he wrote about his nonna went viral, which led to an appearance on Canada’s Got Talent in April 2025. An illustrated children’s book called Nonna, written by Moyo, followed that May. “She’s an online celebrity in her own right,” Moyo says of his nonna. “She loves it.”
Is There a Children’s Show in the Future?
While he’s still focused on creating educational Italian song videos for children, and still teaches full-time, Moyo hopes to develop a full-fledged children’s show one day. He’s starting to experiment with more advanced video features like performing in front of a green screen and has hired illustrators and animators to enhance the production value of his content.
As one of 21 digital creators selected for the third edition of the Canada Media Fund’s Digital Creators Pilot Program, Moyo gets to share in the total $394,000 handed out this year. The program’s goal is to support the growth of mid-career Canadian digital content creators making short-form video content exclusively on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. The funding will help Moyo amp up the quality of his videos and grow his channel. “Eventually, down the road, I want to be doing full-on kids’ concerts,” Moyo says. “I really take a lot of inspiration from Robert Munsch and Raffi and what they've been able to accomplish with their careers.”
As Moyo goes all-in with his educational children’s content, he admits he’s had to set aside his “adult” singer-songwriter interests. “I’ve kind of pinned myself as a kids’ musician now,” he says. “It’s difficult to get back to my original music, but I enjoy it. I love seeing the kids' faces.”
A highlight of his career was a book signing at an Indigo store in the summer of 2025. “I saw so many families there with their kids and moms and dads and grandparents and granddaughters, all together, singing together,” Moyo recalls. “It was such an incredible experience, and it made me feel like I had a purpose.”
While online educational content for kids is already overwhelmingly popular, Moyo sees this landscape growing even more in the future. “Every kid is basically holding an iPad now,” he says. “I think more resources and more funding is going to be put into what we’re doing.”
He sees a future where school boards could invest in social media programs and use them as an educational resource. “Schools can have their own YouTube,” he says. “I think it's going to grow and, at the same time, bring us together even more.”
