This workshop demonstrates the similarities between meter, rhyme, and rhythm in poetry and songs. Fun poems by Jack Prelutsky, Bruce Lansky, Shel Silverstein are put to different genres of music, such as country, folk, rock, blues, etc. This allows the children to understand the importance of meter and rhythm in poetry and why a rhyming word at the end of a line does not a poem make. Songs include: “A Bad Case of the Giggles,” “Sorry,” “Sick,” “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me, Too,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and others.

Children absolutely love with workshop and happily take part in singing these funny and memorable songs.

Time frame: adjustable according to time frame needed

Why Poetry to Song?

To children, songs become stories, adventure, and, to a teacher/parent’s delight, learning tools. Children understand rhythm because everyday life consists of rhythm. Nature is rhythmic. Just listen to the tide or a bird’s trill or the rainfall. Even humans and animals are rhythmic. Consider our breathing, in, out, in, out, or a cat’s meow, and it’s lazy purr. Listen to the whippoorwill. Music is everywhere. We take it with us wherever we go, us in our voices, our hands, our feet, and even our shoulders in the way we sway.

Children express through music, bouncing, dancing, skipping, running, clapping with the music. Children love to make up songs and sing to their own music.

They hear music everyday because it’s used in all forms of entertainment and in formal settings, such as worship, ceremonies, and celebrations. Through ballads and historical songs, past beliefs and values often are shared and sometimes passed on to the next generation, thereby teaching history and culture.

MUSIC - a combination of sounds that has rhythm and melody and is pleasing to hear.

RHYTHM - the repetition of a beat or sound in a regular or predictable pattern.

CULTURE - the behaviors learned and practiced by a specific group of people. The way of life determined by the people's morals, values, customs, and attitudes.

Music and rhythm can help children:

• express.
• Become confident
• learn about other cultures and other countries
• learn academically through repetition, meter, and rhythm. Remember the ABC song? There’s a reason it never grows old.

Using funny poetry the children know will help motivate their participation while focusing on the music or rhythm activity.