Campfire songs and This Little Dog of Mine

This past week I was asked to come and teach kids (grades 1-5) how to write their own campfire songs.  It was a lot of fun to work on this lesson plan and even more fun to do with the kids.  Here are a couple of ideas I came up with.

To illustrate the ingredients that make up a song, I came up with this activity:

"Words, Rhythm, Chords and Notes"  (to the tune of, "Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes")

Here are the lyrics:

Words, rhythm chords and notes, la la la
Words, rhythm chords and notes, la la la
These are things that go in a song
Words, rhythm chords and notes, la la la

Divide into 4 groups: One for each of the above (Words, Rhythm, Chords and Notes)
When we sing “words" – the word group will sign a letter (as in American Sign Language) to represent words.
When we sing the word "rhythm" the rhythm group will clap 2xs
When we sing the word “chords” that group will strum 2xs an air guitar
The “Notes" group will sing, "la la la."

We had fun doing that! Then we took songs we already knew the melody/chords/rhythm and wrote our own words to it. My favorite one was 'This Little Dog of Mine (I'm gonna treat him fine) " (to the tune of "This Little Light of Mine." )  The idea was to write a song to teach people ways to be kind to animals, in this case specifically dogs. The kids had great ideas like, "buy him a toy, " feed him a treat, " "give him water, " "walk in the park," etc. 

We also did songs about favorite summertime activities  and things they did at camp (Old McDonald Had a Camp EIEIO).  It was great fun!