A-Hunting We Will Go!

This book is great for winter! The two main characters are children, all warm in their jammies and getting ready for bed. While they are getting ready, they imagine all sorts of fun scenarios with their stuffed animals as they gather them together for bedtime. Each page is rich with many things to look at and so much going on that you could spend a long time pointing out all the fun things to your kids.

I Have a Little Snowman

This is a song that the youngest kids love! It allows them to act out the building of a snowman and is silly at the end, so it creates a lot of giggles, which I love! You could do this with older kids and teach them Solfege (Do-Re-Mi) in the process. It starts on Do and ascends the scale slowly. At the end, it quickly goes back down the scale and it's fabulous practice for getting their Solfege hands signs straight. Here is a youtube video that shows the hands signs for the Solfege scale if you would like to learn them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_pq9s9USmI . Here are the lyrics to this song along with the solfege symbols that correlate:


I have a little snowman. He is so fat and round.
Do                                            Re
I made him from a snowball I rolled upon the ground.
  Mi                                               Fa
I gave him eyes, a nose, a mouth, a nice warm scarf of red.
  Sol                                                         La
I put some buttons on his coat and a hat upon his head.
  Ti                                                             Do
Slowly, slowly melts the snowman!
Do Ti  La Sol Fa    Mi Re   Do

Play this audio file to hear how the song goes:


For the younger kids, here are the actions for the song: Start kneeling on the ground and form into a little ball. For each step up the scale get a little taller until finally at the end you are standing up straight with your arms in the sky for greater height. On the last line, melt from your highest height back down into the tiny ball you started with. Do this several times and experiment with tempos (fast and slow). I hope you have fun with this song!

Return from an extended Holiday...

Hey everyone! I am finally back and ready to go again. We got uber sick over the holidays and I am just barely recovering from a bout with pneumonia. The second round of antibiotics finally did the trick. I am so happy to be feeling well again! I thought I'd do some Winter songs for a couple of weeks in January. One of my favorite Winter songs is What Shall We Do When We All Go Out. There's a book by the same title that is out of print, but you can probably find it at your local library, eBay or Amazon. It features all summer things, and I took it and had the kids help me change the words. Here are the lyrics:

What shall we do when we all go out, all go out, all go out?
What shall we do when we all go out, when we all go out to play?

We will build a snowman, a snowman, a snowman.
We will build a snowman when we all go out to play
(We will sled downhill, We will build an igloo, we will all throw snowballs, etc.)

I have the kids act out the words they are saying and it's a great song not only for creating their own music, but getting some movement going. Here's a vocal audio file for the song: