Last day!

It was my last day for this session at North York Women's Shelter, so we made sure to get in all our favourite songs! My personal favourite with the group has been Walk, Walk, Stop. I love when I sing "stop" and we all freeze in silly positions – it's incredibly fun (and hard not to laugh at some of the faces that are made!) We also played with the frogs as our special instruments of the week, which were a huge hit! I will certainly miss playing with that group of kids and moms each week!

Listen to the Water

While we tend to do very active songs with this energetic group, another song that is also a big hit, and requested every single week, is Listen to the Water. Every week I'm impressed by the range of animals the kids come up with to sing in the song! This week we had a water snake, a "prickly fish" and a dolphin. We seem to challenge ourselves to come up with new animals instead of using ones we've said before – it's great!

Bouncing Around!

Today's group was smaller than usual, but had the energy of a large group! Our singing time got us up and moving a lot. We did the Hokey Pokey, we hopped like bunnies (and frogs!) and we stood up and spun around with What Are You Wearing? One of the best parts today, though, was singing "Well you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you STOP" and then coming up with the silliest frozen positions we possibly could every time we stopped!

I'm in the Mood

We were all in the mood for singing as we gathered together at North York Women's Shelter! A couple kids came in, saw me, and immediately started signing the Hello Song. It's wonderful to work with a group of children who have so much enthusiasm! One of our jam songs was I'm in the Mood for Singing, and we replaced singing with shaking, banging and playing so that we could shake tambourines, maracas and bells, bang on our drums and play all our instruments together. We also jammed to The Alphabet Song, by request!

Active Singing

Today I was warned that the kids were all acting a bit nutty and that they may have trouble focusing. This being the case, we focused our energies (and there was a LOT of energy!) on singing lots of active songs! We were up and down and all around with songs like All Around the Kitchen, The Hokey Pokey, What are You Wearing, Johnny Works with One Hammer, and perhaps most importantly, Sleeping Bunnies. We sang three rounds of Sleeping Bunnies and probably could have done three more from all the hop, hop, hopping that was going on in that room! A great class with great energy!

Into the Groove

This group is right into the Rainbow Songs Foundation singing groove! From the moment I entered the building I was greeted with smiles and hellos and children eager to gather around me to try out my guitar. As we started into our time together I was almost immediately bombarded with song suggestions from a couple of the kids who wanted to make sure we sang Listen to the Water, because they like making a fish face when we sing about seeing fish by the waterside. We also have one boy who refused to participate in the first session, but is now so eager to sing and provide song suggestions as we go along. These kids are so keen to sing and dance! It can get a bit wild, but in the best musical way possible!

Parachute Party!

Joining in with the crew at North York Women’s Shelter (NYWS) for the first time was wonderful! While a staff member helped get me set up, a couple sets of eyes kept sneaking into the room to see what was going on and ask me questions about my guitar – we had a captive audience right from the start! One of the highlights from this class is that the mothers who attended were highly interested in learning all the letters of the alphabet in sign language that they could; I'm sure they'll be practising with their kids in between classes. Another major highlight for everyone was the parachute! It came out and dancing and squealing immediately ensued. We shook the parachute, lifted it up and down to the beat, and pointed to all the colours on it as they were called. A perfect way to end our first session!