Monday, September 1, 2008

Singing Helps



I discovered this book a few months ago at Deseret Book. It's called "Super Little Singers" by Mary H. Ross. I was wanting some fun visual aids for teaching my kids primary songs and other fun songs. This is perfect. It is filled with full-color, ready-to-use visuals and activities for a wide array of songs, from "My Heavenly Father Loves Me" to "The Wheels On the Bus." What you do is cut out the pictures, glue them on to card stock or poster paper and then laminate them. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it. If you do one song at a time, pretty soon you'll have a pile of visuals that your kids will love (having Kinkos laminate everything for you will get expensive very fast, so it's more economical to do it yourself). One of the visuals I've done so far is so much fun. It's a tree with lots of little birds (those took a while to cut out) that are separate from the tree. I put a song on the back of each bird, tape the birds all around the living room, and have N go find them all. We sing the song written on each bird and then he puts the bird back home in its tree. He loves it.

The book also includes suggested actions for songs. I'm not always very good at coming up with actions, so that's very helpful. It also has singing motivators, like the birds and the tree I already mentioned. It's a really helpful book.N likes to sing, but he doesn't always like to learn new songs. It helps him when he has something to look at. The only drawback is it takes some time to cut everything out and stuff. I've cut my songs out when my kids are in bed, and I can just watch a movie and cut.

Anybody else have a resource they love for teaching songs? Any great ideas for teaching kids new songs? I'm all ears!

3 comments:

Little Miracle said...

The thing that works best for Bradley is just listening to the songs in the car. His current favorites are Sweet Baby James, and Do You Hear The People Sing. At Christmas it will be Josh Groban's version of Little Drummer Boy.

Lindsay said...

Ok, this is the best blog idea ever! I will definitely be checking often. I have a friend who was just talking about things to do with her little girl, so I will totally have her come here - God one Mary!

Lindsay said...

Oh, one book I love that I has when I was growing up is "My Picture Book of Songs" - it was written in the 1940's, and it just has a bunch of cute songs about everything Holidays/eating vegetables the zoo etc.