This Is Your World: Learn Music Literacy Through Singing

Here are 260 simple yet highly educational folk and traditional songs, chosen to teach children musical literacy through active singing. They can be used in classroom teaching and are also ideal for homeschoolers.

We have songs about bugs, birds, and beasts; dance songs, singing games, tongue-twisters, and fingerplay. We have songs to put you to sleep and songs to wake you up again. Songs to sing when you’re mad and when you are glad. We have hymns, love songs, songs about building our country, songs about America’s forests and plains, songs about cowboys and buffalo gals.

This Is Your World is a children’s song book with several unique characteristics:

●All the songs can be sung without accompaniment.

●The songs reflect the folk traditions and the musical lives of the many peoples who have come to America’s shores.

●Almost all of the songs in this collection are folk songs, a body of songs and ballads in the oral tradition, of unknown authorship. Songs in oral tradition are never finished but are always in process, each singer bringing something to the song and perhaps taking something away.

However, we have also included some songs of known authorship that have proven themselves over a period of time.

“I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you’re born to lose. Because you’re either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world.”

—WOODY GUTHRIE, Bound for Glory

The method behind this book is the fruit of fifty years’ practical experience in teaching kids music. It’s designed for classroom use and is also perfect for a homeschool setting. It uses the experience of singing to launch children into reading and writing music, and the beginnings of music theory.

Our method uses familiar songs as building blocks of musical understanding, employing pitch and rhythm patterns, each pattern tied to a specific song. This approach

opens up unique opportunities for ear training and the development of children’s musical imagination.

The benefits of music training in childhood are not confined to music. Research has now confirmed that there is an impact of musical awareness upon general cognitive skills and educational achievement in academic subjects. So there is a broad intellectual and cultural benefit arising from musical education.

This Is Your World is a song book that can be used on its own, but is designed to be used in conjunction with the Children’s Singing Workshop. The CHILDREN’S SINGING WORKSHOP is a dynamic modern approach to teaching music, combining modern pedagogy and technology with the folk music heritage of our past. It is designed to be used by the non-musically educated teacher as well as the specialist.