Counting Songs

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: GUEST,Keeneyes
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 01:23 AM

How about:

Sittin in my boat Warmin in the countin alot of fishes havin' lots of fun
How many fishes swimming under me? Pair them up by 2's and count them with me.

2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18
20 That's the end of my set!
X2
Theres alot of songs go to
Skipcountinsongs.com and you will see songs for your toddler or infant.

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 07:47 PM

I see that this thread has had several spasms of activity, over several years, so I'm a little surprised that no-one has yet mentioned the antidote to counting songs: "Ten sticks of dynamite".

Richard

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: beeliner
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 08:45 PM

Nearly all of the above mentioned involve cardinals.

For ordinals, it's hard to beat 'Seven Old Ladies Locked in a Lava-t'ry'.

Anyone recall the lyrics?

Subject: RE: Counting Songs-five crows
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Aug 11 - 02:06 PM

Counting Songs-five crows

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 27 Mar 13 - 11:39 AM

I am visiting New Orleans on "spring break" (my wife is a teacher). Yesterday we took a bus tour of the city. Our driver/tour guide was a lifelong NO resident, about 60+ years old. As he drove by the French Market, which is now filled with tourist-oriented shops, he explained that in his youth it was mainly a fruit-and-vegetable market. He said when he was a kid he would go down there early in the morning, before school, and the merchants would pay him to help unload produce from trucks. Watermelons, for example, had to be counted as you unloaded them, and the workers would sing "counting songs."

I asked him: "Sing us a counting song." He said, "I can't" but he explained that any song or hymn that you already knew could be turned into a counting song—you just sing numbers instead of words.

So a counting song, in this context, is a kind of work song.

Anybody know anything more about this?

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: Sanjay Sircar
Date: 27 Mar 13 - 08:09 PM

FIVE currant buns in the baker's shop
Fat and brown with the sugar on the top
A boy came in to the shop one day
Paid his money and took one right away!

FOUR.... etc.

I leant this the first day of nursery school in Calcutta, 1959, from Mrs Winifred Ray, an englishwoman.

I *think* Eleanor Farjeon in her autobiography has a reference to this song, from HER childhood.

If not, she certainly has one to a poem, which I also learnt (1964), which is tangentially relevant to the teaching numbers topic here, about a boy getting numbers and measures of things in the verbal shopping list his mother has given him mixed up in his head: "A pound of tea at one and three/A pot of strawberry jam/A dozen pegs/Four new-laid eggs/And a pound of rashers of ham." etc. ending "...And a pound of rashers of jam!" Farjeon dates this to the 1880s, I think...

Sanjay Sircar

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: Mo the caller
Date: 28 Mar 13 - 06:46 AM

I googled that poem, Going on an Errand
It reminded me of a more recent telling of the same story - Don't Forget the Bacon by Pat Hutchins. I loved that book when my children were small. The shopping list gets hopelessly and fantastically garbled though the last item stays the same "and don't forget the bacon". He stops at all the right shops and the shopkeepers help him to decode things so he takes his basketful home - "oh, I forgot the bacon"

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: GUEST,Kurt Cooper
Date: 30 Mar 14 - 05:46 PM

I remember

Noah surely knew a
Good thing when he threw a
Party on his great big ark
He knew that countin' by two
Was easy even in the dark.

First came two gorillas
Then two armidillas
Now the score was up to four

Then came two kangaroos
That added up to six here's more

Subject: RE: Counting Songs
From: Bert
Date: 30 Mar 14 - 11:27 PM

Exponential Blarney by Bert - Tune: Back to Donegal

If you go to Ireland
and you have a tale to tell
Well they'll tell you a couple back
And tell 'em twice as well

Chorus:
For two to one's the deal me lads
the best you've ever known
for everyone in Ireland
has kissed the Blarney Stone.

Now you've got three stories
You're really in a fix
If you tell 'em to a friend me boys
He'll come back with six.

Chorus

Now you've got nine stories
and as sure as Ireland's green
You tell 'em to a neighbor
and he'll tell you eighteen

Chorus

Now I've twenty seven stories
and if I tell them to you
You'll have to tell me fifty four
before this day is through

Chorus

And if you keep telling stories
As you go from door to door
You'll have fifty million stories
that you've never heard before.

Chorus