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When you spend all day with a baby, you also spend a lot of time with kids' music, books, and toys. One day, while feeding my daughter and listening to Sharon, Lois, and Bram, I heard their version of Old King Cole for the first time. The first verse is the traditional rhyme that most of us know, where the king calls for his three fiddlers. The second and third verses, however, change the instrument from a fiddle to a clarinet, and then to a trumpet. I have used other similar adaptations of nursery rhymes in story times in the past, and I immediately thought that Old King Cole would make a nice addition to that list. Specifically, I like that it provides an opportunity to introduce musical vocabulary into story time and to teach kids that there are words for instruments, as well as specific titles for the people who play those instruments.
To mimic what I would do on an actual flannel board, I created just a single slide in Google Drive, where the pipe and bowl and the various instruments fade in and out to show how they would be added to and removed from the flannel board. Below are the presentation, my script for sharing this flannel board with preschoolers, and links for all the clipart I used.
(Click the right arrow to advance the presentation.)
Sing:
(Hear the Sharon, Lois, and Bram version of the song here.)
Old King Cole was a merry old soul
and a merry old soul was he!
He called for his pipe,
and he called for his bowl,
and he called for his fiddlers three.
Add pipe and bowl to the flannel board as they are named, but do not yet add the fiddles.
Say:
Hmmm... what is a fiddle? A violin! Right! And if we have three fiddlers, how many fiddles do we need? That's right! Three! Help me count them, okay?
Add fiddles to flannel board, counting aloud with the children.
How would you play a fiddle? Let's pretend to play our fiddles as we sing the second part of the song.
Pretend to play a violin.
Sing:
Every fiddler had a fine fiddle,
And a very fine fiddle had he;
Oh there's none so rare, as can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.
Repeat full rhyme twice more, substituting fiddles with clarinets and trumpets.
Say:
Now it's your turn. Which instrument would you like to sing about next?
Possible choices are included at the end of the Google Drive presentation - oboe, saxophone, flute, and harp.
You can download the clipart images I used from the following links:
This week, Flannel Friday is hosted by Kathryn at Fun with Friends at Storytime. For more on Flannel Friday, visit the official website.
This is a wonderful activity, I cant wait to do this with my preschool class during our nursery rhymes unit!
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