Part 1 of the Music Mini Series:
Winter Songs
Seasonal songs and rhymes are a gentle way of incorporating more music into your days. Many of us know Christmas songs and carols but not too many songs for other times of the year - especially late winter. Here are a few of our favourite resources for late Winter music, both for playing/singing and for listening.
Wynstone Press Songbooks
These are full of gentle, seasonal songs, poems, and finger plays. The Winter edition is my least favourite of the four because the songs are very Christmas-focused and quite religious; the poems and fingerplays are a bit more nature based, and there are a couple of lovely simple snow-related songs. A’s favourite verse from this book at the moment is:
I am a snowman, cold and white.
I stand so still through all the night.
With a carrot nose, and head held high,
And a lump of coal to make each eye.
I have a muffler made of red,
And a stovepipe hat upon my head.
The sun is coming out! Oh, my!
I think I am going to cry.
Yesterday I was so plump and round.
Now I’m just a river on the ground.
The songs are all in pentatonic scale - although written in musical notation - so they are all quite easy to play.
Singing Rascals Pentatonic
This is in the Colourstrings series of first music books, and is both the simplest of the three and has the most seasonal tunes. This is written in musical notation but is accompanied by solfege hand symbols, so it’s possible to play these tunes without fully reading written music. As the title indicates, all the tunes are in pentatonic scale.
Lorraine Nelson Wolff’s Come Follow Me Volume One and Two
These tunes are lovely! They are gentle, nature-based, very singable and easy to memorise. I am not a natural player by ear, but I have been able to pick out a good number of these on the piano just from listening several times. We listen on Spotify but you can also buy the albums from Lorraine’s website, iTunes, and Amazon. These tunes accompany us through our day. Our late winter favourites are “The Mitten Song” (“Thumbs in the thumb place/fingers all together/this is the song we sing in mitten weather’) and “The North Wind Doth Blow” (‘The North Wind doth blow/and we shall have snow/and what will the Robin do then, poor thing? He’ll sleep in the barn/and keep himself warm/ and hide his head under his wing, poor thing’). Elizabeth Mitchell also has a version of this song we love.
Some of these tunes- and many other similar ones - are performed by Dany Rosevear on her Youtube channel. Our favourite winter tune of hers is the Snowdrop song. It’s early but we’ve already started singing it to encourage the snowdrops to come out.
Dany Rosevear also has a very comprehensive music website called Singing Games for Children, where she has the lyrics, chords, and sheet music for many of the songs she performs. You can find the Mitten Song as well as lots of other gems!
Other Winter themed music
We listen to a lot of classical music and I try to find seasonal compositions to add to our playlists. Right now we have Tchaikovsky’s “Winter Dreams,” Vivaldi’s “Winter” from the Four Seasons, and some quite spare-sounding Bartok which makes me feel wintery. We also have ‘California Dreaming’ by the Mamas and the Papas on our winter playlist and some other less ‘serious’ tunes.
What if I can’t read music or play any instruments?
It’s lovely to play songs yourself - and I have full confidence that every single one of you could pick out a pentatonic tune on a glockenspiel or keyboard with a small bit of effort - but it’s not necessary. Sing along to the radio (is it still called that when we listen to spotify?) or just listen and have the music be part of your day. I try to keep our seasonal playlists fairly short so that we can give the whole set of tunes a complete listen one or two times every day, usually in the morning as we have breakfast and get ready to go out, and then again in the afternoon either during a snack or in the car if we’ve driven anywhere that day. This way we all learn them quite quickly and the songs become seasonal anchors for us, as well as touchpoints in our day. In time, we will all remember them enough to look forward to our old friends coming round again at the next turn of the seasons, and it will help our children (and us!) to feel grounded and secure.