It's a Holiday!

Welcome back to More with Music!
The holidays are in full swing and I'm glad to be on break for a little while.

Today I wanted to share a song by Ella Jenkins that I like to use during the holiday season.
The song is called, "It's a Holiday".  It features lots of call and response singing and vocables too (la la la, etc.)

The main songs lyrics are:

"It's a holiday." (students repeat)
"It's a holiday."  (students repeat)
"It's a holiday and it comes once a year."   (students repeat)

You can listen to part of this song here.

It's an incredibly easy song, and that's one reason why I like to use it with students.  Besides teaching the call and response part of the song, you can have students play rhythm instruments during the "la, la, la" sections.

After the song is taught, I like to insert December holidays in the song.
So, the song might go something like this (after singing the beginning part as written above):

"It's Christmas"
"It's Christmas"
"It's Christmas and it comes once a year"

The possibilities are endless, as you could insert each December holiday most teachers talk about with the students (Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, New Year's Day,etc.).   One way to involve nonverbal students is to have pictures to represent each holiday and they can eye gaze, point to, find, or hand you the picture representing the holiday you mention each verse.

One more adaptation for this song would be to ask clients/patients (who are older, more mature) what are their fondest memories of Christmas, Winter, (Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, etc or whatever holidays they celebrate), and do some very basic song writing by inserting their answers.
It might sound like this...

"I like the family time"
"I like all the good food."
"I like the Christmas lights"
etc, etc...

How many ways could you use this song?


As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a very Merry Christmas!