Blog Posts

Ideas for Earth Day

Denise Gagne

There are songs for Earth Day in all levels of Musicplay.
Musicplay K - #137 We've Got the Whole World
Musicplay 1 - #92 Let's Save Water
Musicplay 2 - #74 Garbage, #77 Recyle, and #29 Make a Difference
Musicplay 3 - #78 Walk, Run, Ride a Bike
Musicplay 4 - #73 Plant a Tree and #72 We've Only Got One Planet
Musicplay 5 - #81 Show you Care

Some of the songs come from the musical revue, "We've Only Got One Planet."

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Concern about the environment, and the future of our world is in everybody’s thoughts today. I hope that this set of songs will help to make students, teachers and parents more aware of environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.

Topics for discussion and suggested activities are included for each song. There are many different problems with our environment, and one set of songs cannot look at all of them. I’ve chosen to look at the problems that children can do something about.

Link to: We've Only Got One Planet

The teacher's guide contains classroom activities, piano accompaniments, staging and movement ideas, and reproducible student handouts with dialogue and lyrics for the environmental revue.

You will find in this set a variety of styles, metres, tempos and modes. There are 2 songs that have an optional second part, that is easily learned by Grade 4-5 students.

This collection was the very first collection that I (Denise Gagne) ever published. I wrote the lyrics for the songs while on a road trip taking my daughters to the swimming pool in Lloydminster, SK. I remember the day, because I was 9.5 months pregnant with my youngest. It's disheartening that the issues that I wrote about in 1989 are still completely relevant today! This was the very first recording I ever produced, and my daughters were 6 and 9 (Gr. 1 and 4). Our third singer was our neighbour's daughter, Andrea Vallee, who was 8. We will redo this recording some day, but I will have a hard time replacing the recording of my girls when they were young.

The most well known song from this collection is also in Musicplay 2. We Can Make a Difference is the final song in the collection, and it summarizes what I believe, that children can make a difference. This song has been used in a wide variety of settings. It's a school song for many schools, including the school that was the Dare school for the RCMP officer, Constable David Wynn, killed on duty in Edmonton in January. The school sang the song at his memorial as the casket was carried out of the arena. The song was performed by Gander Newfoundland's grade 2 classes at the 9/11 memorial in 2011 - this was on national TV.

LINK TO PERFORMANCE