Michael Finnegan

This silly old folk song offers a number of creative opportunities for teaching. Start by learning the tune basically as we've published it.

Make Your Own Kind Of Music

Listen to the folk instruments on the recording including guitars, banjo, mandolin and bass. The "pickin' and grinnin'" guitar solos between verses are worth listening to even if you don't use the tape in your performances or lesson plans.

While this song is fun with the recording, it is also perfect for live performance with your students doing their own accompaniment. It can be played on guitar or autoharp, playing just unison C's to the rhythm of the first four bars. Add rhythm sticks, spoons, woodblock, and/or tambourine, or, if you're feeling adventurous, make a washtub bass or assemble a jug band. This song would also go well with clapping and patsching. Let your students concoct movement patterns that let them clap, snap, stomp or patsch alternately their own hands and those of their partners. (OK, maybe just the clapping should be shared.)

Write Your Own Verses!

The rhyming scheme makes this a great song for adding new verses. Start by having the class construct a list of words that rhyme and/or end with "in." There are lots of them, including skin, shin, pin, tin, win, spin, kin, chin, begin, twin, thin, grin... you get the idea. Using creative license, this can be stretched to include words that end in short "-en" sounds: been, den, ten, pen, glen. You can stretch further to use short "-ind" and "-end" words: bend, send, lend, wind. Just seeing all of these words in front of them will spur kids on to verse ideas.

Since most classes have fast, creative kids alongside those who take to such projects more slowly, consider dividing the class into cooperative learning groups. Each group could come up with new verses as well as planning their own performances, movement, etc. Those who may not be the best with words may be great with movement or constructing and performing on instruments.

And So Your Girls Won't Feel Left Out

Let your young women have equal time by converting the song to Suzy or Lori Bennigan. Why should women be left out of the silly song collections? About the only time you hear about them is in songs about "the old woman who..." and that isn't very nice!

You can expand on this concept by using a last name that sets off totally different rhymes, though to work with this song, it will need to be three syllables and should end with something like "-uhgin" to let you come back to "again" in every verse.

Just remember that any creative effort is a positive exercise, and should be rewarded with praise and encouragement. There are no wrong rhymes, just some that work a little better than others. Relax and have fun and your students will want to do creative things again in the future.