Activity: The Little Green Frog
The Little Green Frog is a charming little song that quickly became a favorite for us. We found it in the book Come On Everybody, Let’s Sing, and it’s written by Lucille Wood and Louise B. Scott. A video is available at the bottom of this blog post.
Here are four ideas for how to use it in your classroom.
Steady beat and instrument exploration: We originally used this song for steady beat and instrument exploration with our students with the highest support needs. It’s a quick and catchy tune with child-friendly imagery, so it gives a clear structure to students who are trying out a new instrument for the first time. Some of our students with limited motor control enjoy receiving hand-over-hand or hand-under-hand assistance with this type of activity. We use drums, tambourines, shakers, claves, maracas, triangle, cabasa, shekere, and similar unpitched percussion.
In the video (0:32) you can briefly see a frog finger puppet on a drumstick playing a frame drum. That type of setup is great for a few reasons. Number one, using the frog puppet gives visual support for comprehension of the song lyrics. Number two, the puppet itself is engaging and kids want to interact with it and make it “jump” on the drum or tambourine or jam block. Number three, using a drumstick to play the drum is an accessibility measure for kids who have limited motor control or range of motion and can’t satisfyingly play the frame drum with their bare hands. Sometimes those kids can grasp a drumstick, with or without support, and play with just a small wrist motion.
Simple harmonic accompaniment: Because this song is harmonized with only two chords, D minor and A7, it also lends itself well to simple pitched instruments and alternative music notation. In the video (0:41) I am leading a group in playing these two chords without using any printed notation at all; instead I am using physical gesture to show when to play D minor and A7. In that particular case, each person had one note from each chord and was holding their chimes in their hands in a way that mirrored my gestures. We talked about the “window side hand” (D minor) and the “wall side hand” (A7). For an even simpler version, you can have one group of students sitting together on one side to play D minor and another group to play A7. Point to each group when it is their turn to play.
Expressive movement: Another way I would use this song with an inclusion or lower-support-needs class would be as expressive movement. The way that we perform it with swing rhythms and syncopations begs for strutting locomotion, then the melodic octave leap, where the frog snaps at the fly, is a moment for punctuated movement. I would first give directions to students about an action they could do at that moment in the song like a single clap, clap above their heads, jump, pop their fingers open, even boop themselves on the nose, then I would invite them to give their own suggestions. You could even develop a choice board of movement ideas specific to this activity.
Quarter/eighth note decoding: This song was originally notated with straight quarter notes and eighth notes (as performed in the video at 1:09). I first picked this song out of the book to teach with instruments on a day that Jon was absent as my co-teacher. I had an awesome intern at the time and we had a fine first day using this song as written. The next week Jon came back and as he was accompanying on guitar he swung the rhythms, and we started singing syncopations and it quickly turned into the rendition you heard at the beginning of this video. I really enjoy the song that way and that is one of the reasons I love working with Jon: he routinely pulls me out of my classical music mindset and makes me a better musician.
Anyway, back to the song– if you make a slight modification to the opening to remove the pickup, the entire song can be used for Conversational Solfege Unit 1 to decode quarter notes and eighth notes. (Sing first on words then decode.)
I haven’t yet tried to make up a game to go with this song, but I think it would lend itself well to something playful and interactive. If you have an idea, let us know in the video comments! And make sure you’ve subscribed to our monthly newsletter at music-access.com to get a summary of our posted resources every four or five weeks. I promise we won’t overload your inbox!