Food & Eating Level: Key Stage 1 - Songs & chants

The Ice Cream Song

This song is great to go with the Creative Music section, which is also about Ice Cream!

Did you ever see a ghost eating toast?

Well here's a song about one - Mrs White had a fright in the middle of the night - saw a ghost eating toast, half way up the old lamp post!

The children can have fun making up an intro and an outro for this song, using scary sounds. The chord played here as a simple accompaniment is just two sounds played at the same time (eg D and A OR C and G), which you can easily do on chime bars or a xylophone. This two-note accompaniment is really useful for all sorts of simple songs and it's correct name is a drone.

Sticky Buns (pitch)

An easy action song to teach and learn:

• Sticky Buns
• Sticky Buns
• Sometimes we eat
• Sticky Buns

It's fun to do actions to this little song. In the first three lines, the note pitches go like this: High - Low - Middle and the children could doing the actions of touching heads, knees and tums as they substitute these words:

• Heads knees tums
• Heads knees tums
• Sticky buns go (point to mouth)
• In our tums (rub tummy)

(Yes I know there's potential for the children singing 'up our bums' instead. This reminds me boy called James Farrar who, after a little 'toilet humour' joke, earnestly explained to me that he found it funny because he was ten years old.)

Extension

There are only three notes in the song so it's a good one for the children to learn to play on a keyboard, piano, chime bars or xylophone. On a keyboard or piano, use a set of three black keys in a row near the middle of the piano. On chime bars or xylophone, instead use the notes F, G and A. If you work it out yourself first (start with A F G), you'll be able to help.

You could use a drone accompaniment to this song too - the best notes would be F and C (lower pitch F and higher pitch C).

Hints:

• 1/ If using a xylophone, remove the notes that are not needed, leaving just F, G and A for playing the tune, or just F and C for the drone. This makes it much easier for the children to hit the right notes.
• 2/ For the best sound, the beater needs to bounce off the bars.