Unreasonable Joy

A good hunk of the children’s music out there—especially in the nursery rhyme category—is not only hum-drum for dancing to, but is practically intolerable for adults to listen to at all.  The cd below, Rhymin’ to the Beat, I use for my young tappers all the time! If you teach very young hip-hop, you might also like a few of the tracks.

Here’s the description from Jack Hartmann’s website, Jack Hartmann.com:

• This album includes 14 nursery rhyme favorites with today’s contemporary reggae, pop, country, rock and rap musical styles. Teachers love these upbeat versions of the nursery rhymes to enhance their language and early literacy programs.

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I like to give my 3.5-7 year-old dancers songs that they can sing along with, both so they can use the lyrics to help them remember the movement, and so their brains can have that great workout of singing and dancing at the same time.

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For our upcoming show, my 5-6 year-old tappers are doing a dance called “3 Rockin’ Ryhmes” using a 1 minute cut each from tracks #1-Humpty Dumpty, #13-Hey, Diddle Diddle, & #3-Itsy Bitsy Spider.

• (If you don’t have a program to cut music, check out my Unreasonable Joy post, So You Want To: Cut Music?)

The website also lists a volume 2 album—Rhymin’ to the Beat v.2 – Jack Hartmann.com—but I cannot vouch for that cd because I don’t have it. I do like his song “Dinosaur Stomp” from the Follow a Dream album, which you can listen to excerpts from here.

Art Stone Costumes #2196 – Dance!

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And just for fun….here is the costume for my “3 Rockin’ Rhymes” tap dance (5-6 year-olds) using Jack Hartmann tunes. We’re using the blue one. I can’t wait to see the girlies “wash the spider out” up there on stage in those petticoat skirts!

Happy Rockin’!  ~ Linda