Never Been Used Before – 2024 | 121

Welcome to the final episode of our 2024 podcast series!

As we close out this year, I’m excited to take a reflective look at some beloved resources that I only began using this year—Blowing in the Wind, Grizzly Bear, and A Little Seed. Though these pieces have been around for a while and are widely appreciated in the music education community, I hadn’t brought them into my own classroom until now. It’s been a transformative journey, and I’m eager to share how these resources have impacted my teaching and, most importantly, my students.

This final episode is all about celebrating the power of introducing new material, even when it’s something that’s been out there for some time. As educators, we sometimes get comfortable with our established resources, and it can be easy to overlook or delay trying something new. But as I’ve learned this year, stepping out of that comfort zone can bring a whole new level of energy to the music room. Each of these pieces has played a unique role in creating a dynamic and engaging learning environment.

Blowing in the Wind , I found a song that sparked thoughtful conversations and allowed us to connect music with social themes.

Grizzly Bear, with its lively melody and playful lyrics, became an instant favorite for rhythm exercises.

A Little Seed offered a gentle introduction to vocal technique and expression, resonating especially well with my younger students.

These songs have brought out a different side of my students. Helping them to develop both their musical and emotional expression. Whether it’s watching students get excited over discovering new rhythms Or seeing them gain confidence in their voices. Or hearing them ask insightful questions about song lyrics, I’ve seen firsthand how these resources have enriched our musical journey together. My hope is that sharing this experience will inspire you to explore new songs and approaches in your own teaching. Even if they’re not necessarily “new” in the field.

So join me as we dive into the power of these songs and celebrate the magic they bring to our classrooms.

Let’s explore how stepping into something new can be the spark that ends the year on a high note and sets the stage for a fresh beginning in 2025!

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

💨 Blowing in the Wind Lyric Video
🐻 Grizzly Bear Notation

🌹 A Little Seed Notation

Crescendo Episodes with Stephanie Leavell – Music for Kiddos

🎧 Music as a Tool for Childhood Success (Part 1 and Part 2)
💻 Music as a Tool for Childhood Success (Vodcast Part 1 and Vodcast Part 2)

📧 Email Debbie at in**@***********om.au with ideas for podcasts! ⭐️

Where to find me: 

Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunity
Official Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEd
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDeb

Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 121.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

If you’d prefer to listen to this episode, click here!

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 121 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

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Debbie O’Shea 

Hello, everyone, it’s Debbie O’Shea here joining you for the last Crescendo Music Education Podcast episode. My puppy wants to get out. Hold on a minute. Just pause there. Hello. I’m back. Not only did I let my puppy out, she’s very happy out in the yard, I also realised I had naked ears, so I’ve remedied that if you’re watching I now have earrings. I do feel quite odd if I’m not wearing earrings. So my earrings are back in. So my final episode for 2024 I had to come up with a little bit of a rhyme like I did for 2023, Never Been Used Before 2024, it sort of works. You could play around with the rhythm.

Blowing in the Wind

So here I am, three things that I’ve not used in my music classroom until this year. Now, I know some of you, when I read you this list, you might go, yeah, where have you been Debbie? Well, I guess I’ve been in the music room, maybe under a rock in the music room, but these are things that I’ve done in my music room for the first time. So please don’t be judgmental. I won’t judge you. You won’t judge me. Okay, I’m going to start with Stephanie Leavell. Now, if you don’t know Stephanie, you really should. I can’t believe that I didn’t until more recently and now that I use her materials in the Lower School, mainly Prep. Oh, and not only do I love them with a passion, it also is a bit of a voice saver.

I’m pretty croaky at the moment just from use. And her voice is such an excellent model, so beautiful to listen to. So there’s that added advantage. I think my favourite so far has to be Blowing in the Wind. And I’m going to pop a link to YouTube, get on her mailing list. She is very generous with her sharing. Support her any way you can. She’s just magic. But Blowing in the Wind is one of my favourites. I do love Shaking My Egg as well. Now I’m going to have a little go at playing a little bit of Blowing in the Wind from YouTube. Here’s hoping it works and I hope Stephanie doesn’t mind that I’ll just play a little bit rather than me trying to sing it. Particularly at the moment, just have a listen to the beginning of this magnificence.

Debbie O’Shea 

And how magic. The children just love it, the whoosh and plop and let it fall on the ground. And during the song they creep and put it into a ball and then throw it up in the air, and it’s just full of everything that my students love. So Blowing in the Wind is an absolute must for your early childhood music classrooms. And I can’t believe that I haven’t done that until this year. It actually makes me want to do it all the way up to my Year Sixes, because I want to say, Hey, I’m sorry Year Sixes I didn’t know about this song in Prep, so I want you to do it now. The funny thing is, I think my Sixers would love it if I did that.

But anyway, Blowing in the Wind is new for me this year, as is Stephanie Leavell and all her wonderfulness. So as Molly Meldrum would say, do yourself a favour, get right into that and go back and have a listen to the episodes of this podcast where she was a guest. So that is my number one, Blowing in the Wind.

Stephanie Leavell 

Blowing in the wind, blowing in the wind. My scarf is blowing in the wind. Falling down, falling down with a whoosh and plop.

Grizzly Bear

Debbie O’Shea 

My number two is Grizzly Bear. Now I’ve heard it mentioned quite a bit in the past and I’ve heard it on a couple of podcasts and I just hadn’t seen it played or sung and I thought I’m going to check it out, because I like the sound of having the loud part at the end, because I thought I’d heard it was good for soft and loud. So Grizzly Bear, which I will just quickly sing for you down a little bit too low, but you’ll get the idea. (sings) “Grizzly Bear, a grizzly bear is sleeping in a cave.

Grizzly Bear, a grizzly bear is sleeping in a cave. Please be very quiet. Very, very quiet.  If you wake him, if you shake him, he gets very mad”. Then there’s the big mad, the Forte at the end. Wonderful, I’ll put the notation for you in the show notes, which will be on crescendo.com.au under this podcast episode, so you can get the notation there. Wonderful game.

I thought the kids are going to quite like this game, the way that I play it anyway. Oh, they love it. They love it. I gave them their free choice recently and every class went Grizzly Bear. So the kids love it. The way that I play it and I’m sure there’s variations, your way might be better, but my way works, and the kids love it. So this is what I’m doing. They stand in a circle, and the bear curls up and closes their eyes while we sing beautifully, piano and then on the mad the child jumps up. Now the person in the middle, who is the bear, has to point to any child that they see moving, so the children are standing still. When the bear has their back to them, they can have a little wriggle.

But if the bear turns and sees them, they point to them, they’ve got to sit down. So we just have very clear rules. If the bear points to you sit down, even if you weren’t moving and they made a mistake, just sit down anyway. Because the sooner we can do all of that, then we can start again and play with a new bear.

And the students seem to accept that. And I think that’s actually a good thing to accept. You know, umpires decision that sort of thing. They love it, and they love trying to be sneaky and not being caught. Then we just pick another grizzly bear and do it again. So it’s a very effective game that I do with my little ones. Actually looking at my three choices, they’re all for my young ones, which I didn’t do deliberately. They’re just my favourite new things for this year and they all happen to be early years.

A Little Seed

Debbie O’Shea 

This other one is A Little Seed. I actually found A Little Seed on YouTube. I was Googling different ideas for scarves, because at the time I was really into scarves, and we did Blowing in the Wind and I have quite a few favourite scarf things and I thought, I want a new one. So I found this one and went, Ah, it’s beautiful. I taught it to myself.

Worked out the melody from YouTube and I will sing you the version. I will try to, sorry about my husky voice. I will do that for you now. And I will again, put the notation in the show notes on crescendo.com.au. It goes like this (sings) “A little seed for me to sow, a little soil to make it grow, a little sun, a little shower, a little wait and then a flower”. So we have a scarf. I’m sorry I don’t have one on me at the moment for the video. Oh, hold up. I think I do. Wait a sec. I’ll just pause you. I’ll go get a scarf.

I’m back.Gee, this is an interesting episode, isn’t it? Okay? Here we go. I’ve got a scarf. I forgot I bought a few home from school, I thought they were all at school. So you scrunch your scarf and you hold it into your hand, in one hand, and we poke, I’ve got to watch the mic. We poke the seed in, then pop the soil on top, I’m hoping you’re seeing this, to make it grow. A little sun, a little shower. So those of you who are listening not watching little sun, just a nice sunbeam hand, rainbow hand.

With the hand without the scarf, little shower your hand. this is really hard to explain, little raining down droplets onto your hand with the scarf, we wait and then a flower your hand slowly opens up and the flower is revealed. So let’s do it from scratch so you can see it. I’ll move the mic a bit closer to me. Here we go.

(sings) “A little seed for me to sow, a little soil to make it grow, a little sun, a little shower, a little wait and then a flower” and that was the magic flower opening. Again apologies for my croaky voice. I didn’t realise how tired and slightly damaged it is at the moment, but I am hoping that that is enough to give you the idea of how the song goes and it is beautiful. And if you’ve handed out your scarves and you’ve done something with movement, it’s nice to then have a quiet, focused song afterwards.

So I did A Little Seed with my Year Ones’ and Two’s. I haven’t done that one with my little Preps yet and I probably won’t. I’ll save that for Year One. So they are my croaky three things that I Have Never Used Before 2024. There is Blowing in the Wind by the lovely Stephanie Leavell.

There is Grizzly Bear, which I believe is a folk song, please I’m more than happy for you to correct me if there is a source that I did not acknowledge, because I really do try to do the right thing there. So feel free to email me anytime about that stuff or about anything really in**@***********om.au and the good thing is, I don’t have to spell crescendo to you my audience. I tell you what, the number of times I go to a shop to get on their email list or whatever and I have to spell crescendo and the shop person will just either look at me and ask me to re spell, or they’ll just say, It’s okay, I know music, so have an email address like in**@***********om.au and you will soon find out if you’re speaking to a musician or not.

And the third one that I spoke about today was A Little Seed. Three lovely additions to my music classroom from this year.

Goodbye, 2024!

Debbie O’Shea 

I am going to take this little moment to thank you all very much for listening. I’m hoping that you find these podcasts useful, informative and inspirational. I would love to hear from you , anything you’ve liked, anything you want to see more of,what would you like to see in 2025? Because I am in those planning stages now and I’ll be recording over the Christmas period and that’s one of the reasons why we’re having a little pause on these podcasts. Because I’m still working full time, so I need to do my recording in my holidays as a general rule. So I will be recording for 2025 in this time that we’re having a little break.

So I hope you don’t mind we’re having a break, go back and listen to all of the fabulous episodes that you have perhaps missed and also everything now is on YouTube, so you can also watch the episodes and see the amazing people that I have had a chat to over the past couple of years. So have a happy, safe, wonderful Christmas type break, whether yours is long like ours in Australia, or whether it’s a bit shorter like those friends in the northern hemisphere, but I hope you do have a lovely time, lovely break and please keep in touch with Crescendo Music Education. I wish you all the very best in your very important job. See you next year!

Sign-Off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress, don’t lose sight of the funny side of life.
I asked my husband to rate my listening skills. He said you’re an 8 on a scale of 10. I still don’t know why he wants me to urinate on a skeleton.