Storytime: Trees

Books

Trees by Lemniscates

Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson

Who Will Plant a Tree? by Jerry Pallotta

A Tree For Me by Nancy Van Laan

Tree by Britta Teckentrup

There Was a Tree by Rachel Isadora

I haven't posted in a while so I wanted to at least get one of my backlog of posts up before the end of the month! I did this storytime back in April in honor of Arbor Day and Earth Day. I didn't end up using a flannelboard for this one partially because I didn't have time to make a new one and partially because the other activities I had planned took up a large amount of time. I've started to move away from doing flannelboards for every single storytime theme to give myself some breaks from making them.

For tree themed rhymes and songs click read more!

Ukulele: My Roots Go Down Chord Chart

As usual, I haven't caught up with storytime posts. One of these days, I'm going to sit down and get a bunch of them posted all at once, but today is not that day. I did, however, want to share this great tree themed song in celebration of Earth Day over the weekend and Arbor Day this Friday!

Back when I was a child in the 1980s I had a cassette tape (remember those?) called "Two Hands Hold the Earth" by an artist named Sarah Pirtle. You can actually still order it on CD! I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but a lot of the songs really stuck with me. One of those songs was "My Roots Go Down" and I thought it would be a great tune to sing in celebration of the earth and trees so I set out to find ukulele chords for it. In my search, I found a video by musician Isaac Zones of him playing the song, but with some slightly different lyrics, each verse about a different part of a tree. Isaac listed his email in one of the comments on his video so I emailed him and he was kind enough to send me a complete chord chart!

After finding a few different versions of the song by various artists, I was inspired to write my own verses. In my version of the song each verse mentions a different type of tree and a movement you can have the children do along with the song. Using Isaac's chord chart as a guide, I made a chart of my own. This song uses two chords that we haven't used in any of the songs I've listed on the blog so far, but they are both very easy: A minor and C7.

 

Fingering charts from Coustii

The rest of the chords are C, F, and G, which we have gone over in some of my previous ukulele posts. If you need a review, click here! Click read more for my version of Sarah Pirtle's "My Roots Go Down"!