My Year 5 have loved this chant recently, and they have been incredibly adept at making this one simple chant sound very impressive!
Sink a potato deep in the ground,
Dig it and scrub it and peel it all around.
Cook a potato and throw it on a plate.
Melt it with butter, mate -
It's great!
This can serve as a perfect warm-up, or you can go to town and really push the boundaries with it. The final line adds particular interest with the crotchet rest before ‘It’s great!' and of course the title is fun and sets up the quirkiness of the whole chant.
During two 30 minute sessions we achieved the following:
- Whole group - ‘What Do We Already Know?’*
- Looked for traps (such as the first crotchet rest in final bar)
- Said the words through a number of times (before seeing the score)
- Sight-read the rhythms
- Clapped the rhythms
- Tapped the pulse
- Revisited the aforementioned crotchet rest trap (final bar)
- Split into 2 groups (Group 1: Taps Pulse, Group 2: Claps Rhythm)
- Used thinking voices for various parts of the chant
- Performed as a round. Split in groups of 2, 3 and then 4!
*What Do We Already Know?
I'll blog about this separately but in a nutshell, it's about ascertaining what you already know from looking at a score, or even a set of song lyrics. Treat it like an English comprehension. The answers are all there, the knowledge is within but sometimes we need a gentle jog to remind us how to apply it. From the title to the tempo marking, the key signature to and rhythms used in a piece, there's lot to give away before you have even begun to clap/play it.
Top tips on how to take this chant to the next level can be found here in my Sinkapotato Part 2 blog.
Thanks for reading this - I sincerely hope it has provided you with some inspiration and would love to hear your thoughts.
MMM
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