SOUNDTRACK: OZOKIDZ-“Germs” (2013).
This song is also on the WXPN Kids Corner CD. Ozokidz is related to the band Ozomatli, who I don’t know all that much about.
The music in this song is very upbeat reggae with the main melody done on kazoos (I suspect this is all one person, but i don’t know for sure). There’s also some kids’ instruments playing along. The beat is fast enough that I might consider this ska.
This song is a lesson about germs. It begins by telling us how to prevent germs from causing us trouble (washing your hands, mostly). The second half talks about how some germs—some bacteria—are good for us (bacteria is rhymed with healing ya). But certainly the most memorable part of the song is when he rhymes food with poo (and the song stops so a tiny voice can say “ew, he said poo”).
The message is a good one, and the delivery method is more fun than anything else. Although it seems a little half-baked of an idea to me.
[READ: August and September 2013] The Underworlds series
I was delighted when I saw that Tony Abbott had a new series and I couldn’t wait to start reading it to the kids. T. has been asking me to read the Droon series to her like I did for C. But it is such a long series that I was happy to find something shorter to start with. It turns out that this Underworlds series is aimed a little older than Droon. It gets pretty dark, and I was a little worried about some of the concepts in it (the Underworlds are the realm of death after all–and hmm, she has been talking a lot about death lately…). But in pure Tony Abbott fashion, this was an exciting series where nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake. And there’s humor as well (although somewhat less than in his other series). But what really sold me on this series was the way he uses classical mythology (accurately) to generate the basis and conflict of this story.
And even better than using these mythologies, Abbot merges them so that the different cultural underworlds run into each other and even join forces. It is a great way to learn some mythology if you don’t know it (there are handy maps of the Underworlds) or to gain a more in-depth understanding of the mythologies. By the end of the series, the kids will have encountered the Greek, Norse, Egyptian and Babylonian gods of the Underworld as well as some of the major scary guys that come out of the Underworld. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 