Five Smart Turkeys

Your surveys told us that you wanted more songs for Thanksgiving, and many of you asked for primary songs. With this in mind, we settled on the old folk/children's song, "Five Fat Turkeys." Yeah, we changed the title, for several reasons. Kids using "turkey" to berate another kid is bad enough, but we certainly don't want kids to have another reason to call heavier kids "fat." (As one who has always been "horizontally challenged," this writer can tell you that this sort of taunt is as bad as any you can imagine. I could rage on for pages about obesity being the last bastion of unchecked discrimination, but space is tight, and this isn't really a music education issue.)

Anyway...Having changed the adjective to "smart" simplified another task. The original tune only has one short verse, to our knowledge, so we used the new lyrics as a way of problem solving. "So, how did these smart turkeys avoid becoming dinner?" Creating the new scenarios was a lot of fun, and we quickly found out that there were a lot of possible stories to tell. Telling the story withing the rhythms and rhyming scheme is like working a puzzle, and it is one that we highly recommend to you and your students. First, come up with ideas for the turkeys' escape, then try to tell the stories within the parameters of the music. If you try to write more verses with your students, share the process and outcome with us. We'd love to share it with other teachers.