Songs all kids should know

This has been a topic of discussion on the Well Trained Mind board, so I thought I'd address it here.

My first thought is "What songs are important to you"? Every family has their own musical heritage, that springs from their backgrounds, culture, and beliefs (religious and otherwise), and that's really where you start teaching music and sharing music with your children. Often, this comes from daily life, but I've known many parents who, the second a baby is born, stop listening to their music and put Raffi in the CD player. Now, that's not a bad thing-and there are a few genres of music where that may be a good idea. But in most cases, the music you'll be most comfortable singing with your child is the music that you're comfortable with yourself-the songs you sing in the car when they come on the radio, or sing in the shower. And there aren't many genres that don't have at least SOME songs that are child-appropriate. I once had a three year old student who's favorite song was "When a Man loves a Woman". And man, could she sing that song! Nothing wrong with that-it shows that her parents are sharing their music with her, and that their love of music is being passed to her.


Having said that, though, there are certain types of music that I consider important to children.

The first is nursery rhymes/nursery songs. These are crucial for developing phonemic awareness (Mem Fox, in Reading Magic, relates a study done that shows that children who do not enter school with multiple nursery rhymes memorized struggle with reading later). They also are very useful for early singing skills, because in most cases, they're limited in pitch and range to what young children's voices can manage first. Songs written for more adult audiences usually are pitched too low and have too wide of a range for children to sing well. There's a reason why "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Ring around the rosey" have stuck around-and they're a place to start.

Recommendation-any good nursery rhyme book. Read, sing, and have fun with your child.

The second category is common heritage songs. In the early 1990's, the Music Educators National conference put together a list of songs, with the help of other music organizations, that they felt were common to the US music heritage. While I may not agree with all their selections (and some that were ranked very high in their surveys were not included due to copyright permissions issues), it's a good place to start.

http://www.menc.org/resources/view/get-america-singing-again

The Core knowledge folks ("What your nTH grader should know") also have a list of 170 songs they have chosen to include. This list is very  diverse, and is absolutely wonderful.
http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/406/JN_TOC.pdf

My final category is music from around the world. We include this in our Kindermusik classes and home CDs, but it goes beyond that. My favorite way of finding good world music for children is to go to the source. While Putmayo kids and other world music publishers have done a good job of providing excellent children's music, if you go to an Asian market, or a small grocery store in a Latin American area,  and ask what music they recommend for a X yr old child, often they'll point you to resources you've never considered. I am very fortunate in that, teaching at the University of Memphis, I have a lot of parents from different cultures who are often very, very glad to share their music with me, which, in turn, lets me share that with my students, and with you. And if you're traveling, CDs are great souvenirs, light, portable, and easy to bring home.

Regardless, whatever music you choose, have fun, enjoy it, sing, play, and move!

Musical learning with your preschooler

One thing I've found in the last few years-homeschooling is a misnomer. We're never at home!  What I've discovered is that the car is a great place to reinforce whatever skills my daughter is working on at the time. Obviously, Kindermusik songs were (and are) a big part of the playlist, as are recorder and piano practice CDs now, but there's a lot of academics out there, too.

My favorite way to use these is on an iPod. Set up playlists, then put the playlist on shuffle so you don't have an hour of math, but instead have it mixed up a bit. The iTunes software shows the number of times a song has been played, so if you think that you've heard that particular one a few thousand times, you can check and find that you're right, and take it off the active playlist for a little while.

Here are a few of my favorite resources. Many of these are available for digital downloads.



Dr. Jean-www.drjean.org. Dr. Jean is a noted presenter at early childhood workshops for her ways of making early learning fun for kids. If your child came home from preschool singing "Tooty-Ta", blame Dr. Jean. I'm not thrilled with her singing voice-it's too low pitched for children to sing along with in their most comfortable range well, and she's not a trained vocalist, but as far as concepts go, these are wonderful. You can download whole albums or individual songs. Her CDs are often available at teaching stores as well. Make sure you check for support materials, too-she has a lot of printables to go with the songs on her website.

Sesame Street-sometimes, the traditional is the best. Lots of nice songs, often ones that parents enjoy as much as children, that reinforce academic concepts and social skills.

Leapfrog-you know the videos with the cute frog singing "The A says /a/"? Well, he has a CD, too! I found mine at Dollar General, of all places. Amazon has it for digital download.

Handwriting Without Tears Get Set for School CD -this is one educational CD that is actually very well done musically as well as content wise, and is great at introducing early concepts. There's a second one for reading and math on the website as well, which I don't own, but if it's by the same people is worth considering.

Classics are always the best-both Ella Jenkins and Hap Palmer have recordings of songs that you probably remember singing when you were a child. Or, in the case of Hap Palmer, marching around the room to a scratchy record recording. Because these are mostly re-releases of material recorded years ago, they're not as high of audio quality as some of the other CDs out there, but they're sweet, fun, and often bring back memories.


Twin Sisters These are kind of a "you love 'em or you hate 'em" type set up, because all their recordings have a lot in common-a lot of familiar melodies used to teach concepts, a lot of repetition, and mostly the same voices singing. However, they've got a CD for ANYTHING. If you subscribe to Discovery Education, most of their songs are available as Digital downloads (one song at a time, which gets tedious) so you can find songs that match whatever your child needs at the time. Most teacher's stores sell these, too, and the boxed sets often appear at Big Lots.

Play.Kindermusik.com  is the Kindermusik download site. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of great children's music here, downloadable one song at a time or by albums. The "Loony Libs", "America the Musical", and "Dem Bones" CDs have all made it onto our playlists for more academic reasons, plus lots of fun songs.


And special for blog readers-the first 10 people to mention this blog to me at the UM Open House on August 13 (10:00-11:30 on the Park Avenue Campus)  Parent information night on August 16 (7:00-8:30 at the main Music building at UM), or at the first day of Fall classes will receive a digital download card which will let you download 10 songs (or one album, in most cases) from the play.kindermusik.com site.

Get listening and have fun!