Songs

Abi likes making up little songs, almost always in English. Here are some recent specimens, with commentary:


I. Mommies are different
From daddies and boys.
Daddies are different
From women and girls.

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When I pointed out the lack of symmetry, she corrected the last line to "mommies and girls" -- the right choice, I would say, from the point of view of both rhythm and semantics. A few minutes later, she proudly announced a variation: "Grandmas are different// From grandpas and boys// Etc."

The song is clearly inspired by a song in the movie "Free To Be You And Me" (the melody is similar too). But the moral is exactly the opposite -- the point of the original song (and the whole movie) is to minimize gender differences: "Mommies are people// Daddies are people//...".



II. Get on to the fast rope
Get on to the slow rope
Get on to the visible rope
Get on to the invisible rope
Get on to the magic rope

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I asked what the rope was. Turns out that when they go out for a walk with her class, they use ropes with handles to keep everyone together. The kids have a choice of two ropes: fast and slow. I asked who goes on the slow rope, and Abi, to my astonishment, named all four girls in the class except herself. I asked about the fast rope; she said "Me and all the boys" -- though she later admitted that sometimes one of the girls joins her on the fast rope as well. I couldn't tell if she took pride in this or not.



III. Hot Cross Buns

This is not a song Abi made up, and has nothing to do with gender roles. She learned it last year in music class and hadn't heard it since. This morning she said, "Hey mama, remember this song?" -- and sang it. Her melody was:

do re mi
do re mi
mi mi mi mi
fa fa fa fa
sol fa mi

What impressed me was that, although she misremembered the melody, she misremembered it to fit perfectly on the major scale. The last line was especially striking: it's not a logical ending to a song (unless you're singing harmony), but if you start on sol and have to go down two notes, you have no other choice. It seems Abi has internalized this completely.



IV. The Russian alphabet

Abi has known her English ABCs for more than a year now, probably two. But the Russian alphabet doesn't have a nice song to go with it. (It doesn't fit naturally with the ABC tune -- I had tried that last year and gave up.) So although Abi can read Russian, until recently she didn't know the order of the letters.

But now, in her Russian class, they're going through the alphabet, one letter a week. For homework, the kids have to think of as many words as possible starting with that letter. (Abi likes this game and we spend a lot of time each week coming up with words. She always finishes among the first in the class.) They did L last week, which means that Abi had already learned almost half the alphabet. She started trying to fit what she'd learned to the ABC tune, which inspired me to try again too. With this pressure from Abi, I managed to make up something decent, and taught it to her. Today she finally sang it by herself all the way through. So now she knows two alphabets!