Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for Gramma's Pajamas.

Stream or Purchase from many streaming sites including:

Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer.

The Dinosaurs, Dragons and Me CD (Donna & Andy performance and instrumental) tracks (24) are available for download or physical CD on this website.

11 Cross-curricular activities are provided in the PDF download extending the focus of this song to other subject areas including:

• Fine arts: music, visual art, design
• Language Arts
• Math
• Science
• Social Studies
• Technology

Gramma's Pajamas

I grew up in a rambling farmhouse that included two kitchens and two living rooms. This “double house” setup accommodated my grandmother who lived with us for my whole life. It was great to be able to slip over to Gram’s kitchen for a treat or a snack when Mom’s mealtime options didn’t appeal to our taste buds. Gram also usually had a treat or two, including “store boughten” cookies. We considered this a treat, but her homemade chocolate chip cookies were also delicious and certainly worth eating.

Upstairs, a common hall connected all the bedrooms. My bedroom was across the hall from Gram’s. Sometimes Gram snored and it was loud enough that I could hear her from across the hall. Of course she denied being responsible for this nighttime din, but one afternoon when she was napping, my sisters and I crawled on hands and knees into her room to record her magnificent snoring. We presented the evidence to her later. She insisted it wasn’t really her and that we had just made up the recording ourselves.  

When I first started writing this song, Gram’s snoring was the inspiration. However, my Gram was a proud and proper lady, and would have been mortified to have anyone know that she snored. So, I replaced the snoring details with lyrics about Gramma giggling from being tickled by the lace on her pink nightie and Gram’s reputation was left intact. Until now, I guess!

This song took a long time to write. I had the idea for the first line of the song in 1992. I couldn’t seem to figure out how I wanted the song to go, and the chorus and melodies for the verses kept getting mixed up. I would work on it and then put it away without completing it. In 2005, we (Donna & Andy) began planning for our Dinosaurs, Dragons and Me CD. I knew the bluegrass style of the song would be a fun addition to our CD and I decided to put on a real push to finish it. The musicians we hired to create the bluegrass instrumental track brought the music alive and the result is one of my favourite tracks on the CD. Sometimes song writing takes a long time. I am glad I kept my scraps of notes and didn’t throw them away. In this case, I think the thirteen-year wait was worth it.  

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The download for 4 Turkey Songs and Games includes the vocal scores and audio accompaniment tracks as well. However, I'm sorry you don't have any sample tracks to listen to here at this time.

4 Turkey Songs and Games

I didn’t compose these four turkey songs but as soon as I discovered them, they became favourite seasonal songs I enjoyed sharing with my students leading up to Thanksgiving. Although it is great to be a composer and write what I want to sing with my students, finding great songs written by someone else is also a great way to go. Each turkey song in my collection serves a different purpose in the music classroom: a sing-along song, a simple finger play, an action song, and a game that is always a great end-of-class activity.

I grew up on a family farm, but my farming background did not include any experience with turkeys. My visit to a local farm was very informative and the turkeys had a few tricks to play on me! I am glad my students are not inclined to wander off when I am explaining a game. I am also happy that my students are MUCH better at participating in the turkey songs that I use in my music classroom.

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Tongue twisters are a good fit for older elementary singers.

• The simple melody and musical form of a tongue twister is at an attainable skill level.
• The challenge is learning to accurately sing the tongue-twisting text.
• Tongue twisters can spice up vocal warm ups.
• Spoken tongue twisters are a fun way to warm up before introducing a song.

Spoken tongue twisters are a great ice breaker activity, providing a fun challenge and encouraging participation even from hesitant students.

Tongue twisters are a great warm-up activity at the beginning of a music class or choir rehearsal. Tongue twisters encourage

• clear diction
• expressive delivery of the words

Both of these are excellent skills for singers to develop.

Tongue twisters can be done individually or with others. In a group setting, reticent participants will have the support of their peers as everyone tries to successfully navigate the tricky word combinations. There will always be one student who wants to step up and be in the limelight and be the “star” by doing a tongue twister as a solo effort. Some students will surprise the class by being able to execute a tongue twister flawlessly. For others, when the inevitable slipups happen, everyone has a good laugh, and second (or third!) chances are appreciated.

• Use tongue twisters at the beginning of class as a warm-up or as a fun end-of-class activity.
• Invite students to suggest their favourite tongue twisters to include in your collection. They love it when “their” tongue twister is chosen and someone in the class tries to say it.
• Add dynamic changes to tongue twisters to add even more challenge!
• Use a metronome when the class says a tongue twister. Say the tongue twister with the steady beat of the metronome. Set a faster speed and try it again. Keep a record of the fastest accurate speed and have students try to beat that speed at their next music class.
• Create your own tongue twisters!

Tongue Twister Challenge

(Thanks to Nikki Loney, FULL VOICE Music for this idea.)

• Create slips of paper with selected tongue twisters.
• Put the strips of paper in a container.
• At the beginning of the music lesson, draw out a tongue twister that will be the challenge of the day. For online lessons, the teacher may reach into the jar and pull out a slip when the student says, “STOP”. Add a  dramatic lead up to the extraction of the tongue twister to create suspense and anticipation.

Initially, the teacher may choose the tongue twisters included in the jar. However, students enjoy adding their own favourite tongue twisters to the collection.

To get your jar started, a list of two dozen tongue twisters is provided in this freebie.

Create Your Own Tongue Twisters

Have students create their own tongue twisters. To do this “from scratch” is quite difficult. Rather than come up with a completely unique tongue twister, facilitate the process by using a tongue twister generator. A tongue twister generator takes a known tongue twister and provides specific, alternate word choices that can be used to create an alternate version.

e.g.,  choose words from the table to change this tongue twister:

Students love to create their own tongue twister combinations and challenge each other.

            Who can successfully navigate the twisty words?

            Who can make the most difficult combination?

Creating a tongue-twister generator is not an easy task. A great tongue twister generator has been created by a teaching colleague of mine, and she has graciously given me permission to share it here.

TONGUE TWISTER GENERATOR created by Jennifer Trites.

Download the PDF at:

https://melodiousintent.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/tongue-twister-generator/

Tongue twisters can also be sung. Adding a melodic element to the tongue twister certainly “ups the ante” for the participants. The fun and challenge of successfully navigating the words can take the focus off the fact that students are actually singing.

Singing tongue twisters is a great warm-up activity.

Any one-line tongue twister can be used as a warm-up by singing the tongue twister once on each degree of the scale. Singing a complex tongue twister can make slow scale singing more interesting and even fun!

Singing tongue-twister songs are great additions to general music classes. More complex tongue-twister songs can be used as performance pieces. Make sure the words are enunciated clearly so the audience can understand the lyrics!

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Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for A Birdly Debate.

A Birdly Debate

Inspiration for a song can come in a variety of ways. This song was written because of another cuckoo song I saw in a book. The song included repeated cuckoo lyrics but they were hard to sing and the song didn’t really work for me. For some reason, that sparked the idea of two birds talking back and forth. What would they talk about? Would they argue about who was the superior bird? I jotted down ideas and knew it was going to work as a song when it made me laugh as I was writing.

The cat showed up, almost the same as it does in the song, skulking about the edges of my thought process and inserting itself into the story. I wrote two different endings for the song. I thought both had merit and I couldn’t decide which one to include. My kids used to read “choose your own ending” books. I decided to include both lyric options and leave it up to the singer to choose the ending. As much as it was really a copout on my part not to make the choice, I also think it is fun for the singer to have a bit of say in the matter. I have tried to sing this song with Andy dividing up the cuckoo and rat-a-tat tats back and forth and we usually end up laughing. When the Coldbrook & District School Grade 4-5 Choir (in Nova Scotia) premiered A Birdly Debate, they did a super job and gave this song a good start in the world! Congratulations to the singers and their teacher, Joanna MacPhee Simpson.

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Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for My Chihuahua.

There have been a variety of dogs in my life, mostly family pets I remember from when I was a young child. Dogs were useful on our family farm but we also regarded them as beloved family members. Most of our dogs were larger and family and friends also had large dogs such as German shepherds, Irish setters and Labrador retrievers, to name a few. The one exception was the small chihuahua owned by my aunt and uncle. “Cleo” was a short-haired little dog with protruding eyes and a jaunty little tail. I remember Cleo’s little toenails clicking on the floor when my uncle would get him to dance for us.  

As an adult, I also had the opportunity to meet Diago, a feisty chihuahua who truly lived up to his name. He had a sturdy, wide chest (for a chihuahua) and short stubby legs. His best trick was when his owners would say “Sing, Diago” and he would plant his feet, throw back his head and howl in a most impressive operatic style. He had a big voice for a little dog! I don’t think he understood that he was the smallest individual in the room, and if he did realize that, I am sure it didn’t matter to him at all. He was a fun chihuahua with lots of confidence!

It was good to be able to tap into all this dog experience when writing My Chihuahua, but one might wonder why I chose that topic at all. I had written about a pet hamster (Pickles) after a request from my friend, Nikki Loney at Full Voice Music. A voice teacher who had used Pickles with her students contacted Nikki asking if she might be able to have a chihuahua song written. In turn, Nikki contacted me just in case it might spark an idea for a song. I jotted down the idea in one of my song-idea notebooks and every now and then I would push around lyrics that I thought might work, but I didn’t ever really work on it seriously. I finally got around to writing the song two years later! My Chihuahua is a fun and spicy little song, and I think Diago would approve.

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Sing more dog songs written by Donna Rhodenizer

• It's Raining Cats and Dogs
• I Got a Sister (but I wanted a dog)
• Cyril, the Sausage Dog
• Cat and Dog Canons
• Dogs Hide Bones (singing game) (included in New Singing Games for Young Singers Vol. 1 & Vol. 2)

Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for Computer Cat.

Stream or Purchase from many streaming sites including:

Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer.

The Computer Cat  CD (Donna & Andy performance and instrumental) tracks (24) are available for download or physical CD on this website.

10 Cross-curricular activities are provided in the PDF download extending the focus of this song to other subject areas including:

• Fine arts: music, visual art, drama, dance
• Language arts
• Math
• Technology

Computer Cat is one of my early songs. It was written in the mid 1990s as a result of a question posed by my six-year-old son, Daniel. He had seen me using the computer (or maybe he was using one himself at that point) and he said, “Mom, what would happen if the cat ate the mouse for the computer?” This was an interesting thought and evoked amusing images and it was a great foundation for a fun song. Cats are not known to be particularly cooperative at the best of times. I envisioned the necessity of chasing and catching the cat when it was time to do computer work and then the trouble of convincing it to agree to being pushed around on the desk. The issues of static electricity and being ticklish would certainly create some tension!

It is amazing to me that almost 30 years after writing this song, I can look back and see how much technology has changed since the song was originally written. Many of the computer innovations of the 1990s have been replaced and replaced again in the ensuing years. What we thought was leading-edge technology (which it was at the time) now looks very antiquated. Computer Cat still has appeal as a humorous song, although it may require a bit of historical context for young singers who wonder what a mouse and pad have to do with using a computer!

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Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for these Four Penguin Songs

You can purchase each Penguin song separately.

• I Wonder
• Penguin Parade
• Pondering Penguins
• The Penguin Ball

Save 25% when you purchase all Four Penguin Songs together.

Stream or Purchase the Four Penguin Songs from many streaming sites including:

Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer.

The Computer Cat  CD (Donna & Andy performance and instrumental) tracks (24) is available for download or purchase physical CD on this website.

53 Cross-curricular activities are provided in the PDF download (divided over 4 penguin songs) extending the focus of these songs to other subject areas including:

• Fine arts: music, visual art, dance, drama,
• Language arts
• Math
• Social studies
• Science
• Technology

Four Penguin Songs

I wrote my collection of penguin songs as a result of a request made by a classroom teacher at my school. She was doing a penguin unit with her students and she asked me for a penguin song.  I didn’t know any, so I wrote my own! When her students came to my music class they told me lots of penguin facts to give me ideas for my songs. I discovered that penguins are amazing creatures. The conditions in which they live and the way they survive, live, and raise their babies are all fascinating. With all the facts I found out, I ended up writing four penguin songs.

Some of the songs rely on the facts that the students told me, but other songs in the set dive into the world of imagination with penguins checking their closets for clothing options, attending the ”penguin ball” for some romantic moonlit dancing on the beach, or having a parade in the snow. All in all, I had a grand time writing these four songs and the students enjoyed singing them. After almost three decades, I am happy to report my penguin songs are still being sung and enjoyed by young singers (and their audiences) around the world!

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Follow along with the lyrics as you listen to the accompaniment with melody guide for I Wonder

There are 3 more penguin songs for fun singing in your home school, classroom, vocal studio or choir. 

• Penguin Parade
• Pondering Penguins
• The Penguin Ball

Purchase all Four Penguin Songs together and save 25%

Stream or Purchase from many streaming sites including:

Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer.

The Computer Cat  CD (Donna & Andy performance and instrumental) tracks (24) are available for download or physical CD on this website.

13 Cross-curricular activities are provided in the PDF download extending the focus of this song to other subject areas including:

• Fine arts: music, visual art, drama, dance
• Language arts
• Science
• Technology

I Wonder

This is one of four penguin songs I have written. I was asked by a teacher at my school if I had any penguin songs she could include as part of a penguin unit she was doing with her students. I didn’t have anything to offer her, so when her students came to music class and started telling me everything they knew about penguins, I used that information to write them some songs.

I Wonder explores the limited wardrobe options of a penguin. They always look like they are dressed up in a fancy suit. I think they look quite grand, but I wonder if they ever get tired of wearing the same thing day after day! I imagined a penguin standing at the open door of the closet looking at all those black and white shirts and black suits. I was amused as I wondered what would happen if he decided he wanted to be different and wear something red for a change? I had fun imagining the penguin in this song and writing the lyrics for I Wonder.

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