Category Archives: Fun Videos/Songs

A Child’s Garden of Verses Part 1

Poetry is a topic that is often scary to people – even those who love to read. As a child, I thought poetry to be difficult to understand, uninteresting to read and in general, not for me. But, I have come to realize that there is lots of poetry I have always loved. Lyrics to songs are poetry, Shel Silverstein writes poetry, rhyming couplets such as in some Dr. Seuss books is poetry. I began to reconsider my views and now enjoy reading poetry often.

My Simply Music students have been doing some composing recently. The way I get them started (as most are resistant and think it difficult) is to help the write a Haiku (3 lines, 17 syllables total) and then create a 5 finger pattern melody to go with it. Most have branched out into writing their own verse, or taking longer poems and creating beautiful melodies to go with them. Two of my students have been using verses from Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verse”. I decided to look on YouTube to see if anyone else has done this. 

The music used in the following video is not newly composed, but I loved it because many of the tunes and melodies are ones we are using in Kindermusik. The verse is from RLS and the high school performers are top-notch. Enjoy….

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