National Children's Folksong Repository [NCFR]
The Historic Electronic Online Archive of Children's Folk songs. A Public Folklore Project built by the people of the United States and territories.
WHY SHOULD YOU DO THIS?
What Technology Can Take Away -- Technology Can Save
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In this new millennium we offer the historic electronic online library. Show your pride, document your community, state, or school and share your contributions with others.
OUR OWN "JOHNNY APPLE SOUND SEEDS"
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS?
We are what we remember, and memories are not stored in one place but seamlessly through out our brain. Learning the songs and chants uses sound, rhythm, visual images, smell, tactile body motion, and storytelling. This is how we can draw on past experience subconsciously using a very deep part of the brain. + There's a reason these songs and chants have been around for hundreds of years. They reflected our culture back to us, unfiltered, without corporate America watching.
Songs and Chants are like the apples first brought to the US in the 1490's by Columbus, and just as diverse. Songs first cultivated in different places around the world, spread through Europe and like apples were brought to America.
UF STUDY Playground material is vanishing, children's songs, and chants are disappearing, they are getting lost. Save America's Treasure Grants.
Do you remember when decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe"?
Learn about the importance of unstructured play forms like hand clapping, jumping rope songs, are theorized as arenas where peer-group social organization is accomplished.
The core relationship children have with the oral tradition and play is transformation. Children will take the space they play in, the games and songs they are playing with, and create something new with them. This act gives a feeling and sense of ownership. Old traditions are now transformed and given new life and now we have the new cyberplayground where we find THE NATIONAL CHILDREN'S FOLKSONG REPOSITORY.
Technology plays a big role in its disappearance but the very source of the problem will be used as the solution. We have an online digital archive, and our culture must be preserved. It is important that we give credit to our nation's children who are responsible for keeping culture alive and to reward them with a public project they can build themselves as the nation's archive. We all need to understand the importance of play and the importance music plays in their lives. Nothing else hardwires the brain getting it ready for language and reading like the songs and chants played daily in our playgrounds.
EMPOWER CHILDREN who are the unknown culture makers by RECORDING THEIR VOICES and sharing their cultural heritage. Empower the lay public by generating new excitement about their history created by a heightened awareness and interest in the larger community that is retained in the cultural landscape. The NCFR project is net centric, embedded in cyberspace by breaking the meat space boundaries of neighborhood.
YOU can create and capture our collective heritage put in the nation's online archive called the National Children's Folksong Repository.
Listen to examples already collected from children
AUDIO OF DING DONG
AUDIO OF DOWN BY THE RIVER
MORE EXAMPLES
Phone-o-folk song. Phone-o-phonic. Phone-o-funk.
It's a song or a chant that you phone in but it ain't phony.
THESE CITATIONS show our RHYMING HISTORY.
The playgrounds of the nation are now boundaryless. We can share and compare the cultural connections and diversity of children's living playground poetry with the fabulous oral tradition of all of our ancestors. Allan Lomax says [". . .Rhymes that have been rubbed clean and hard against the bone of life, whose stories are rooted in an eternity of time."][ ". . . Jingles, riddles, silly ballads, wistful lullabies, jiggy tunes and game songs"] belong to the children of America and reflect a composite character of the common people residing in the United States.
The mysterious quality that defines the folk song apart from other forms of music lies in the means by which the song is preserved over time and transmitted in space from author to audience. Folk songs have lasted on the playground in which culture is relatively homogeneous and customs are shared across class and ethnic lines. This is our shared folk culture. The folk song lives in memory alone, and like the proverbial river, into which one can never step twice, it is always in the process of becoming.
The early performers of these folk songs developed their repertoires before they were introduced to the: Printing press, player pianos, film, vinyl, radio, television, VCR, CD, DVD, Internet, WWW, MP3, and the convergence through 3G next generation of all ubiquitous media which has transformed all of us into passive consumers rather than culture makers. We have options. We have an obligation.
At the turn of the nineteenth century we have the era of industrialism, machines, science, and progress. The Post World War II inroads of the technology, electronic media and the merchandising of popular culture whose standardizing and modernizing influences tend to destroy or radically alter long preserved folkways allows this archive the opportunity to reteach generations to come what has been getting lost.
The Problem As Solution - Please Join Our Effort -- This is the public folklore project that the nation's children will build.
A Net Centric Project Offers The Opportunity. Only now can we collect our heritage and give the future generations a living history where these songs that portray the old dramas, conflicts, and celebrations of the American character can be shared in real time from anywhere in the world.
Everyone will act like an ethnomusicologist, collecting the authentic indigenous playground poetry from our children. Some of these songs have been passed down child to child over the centuries and have remained in tact for 500 years.
"Sounds Like Fun"
The collection will be maintained online, everyone will see the "Title" of their submission, the age and name of the person submitting it, the state and town from where it was collected. Children everywhere can participate from anywhere there is a computer. Everyone can share and compare! The Museum, Parents, Schools, the neighborhood Library, Folk & Traditional Arts Programs, Boys or Girls Clubs, the local YMCA, After School Programs, Summer School Programs, Community Technology Centers, Learning Technology Centers, Community Arts Centers, Folklife Centers, Cultural Museums. All of these public institutions can decide to promote and help the children their participate.
What are the benefits for teachers and students?
APRIL CELEBRATES NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
Indigenous PlayGround Poetry - the root story of our children's imaginations.
The topics discussed by poets, novelists, newspapers, historians, playwrights are in folk songs, chants, and play parties. They include stories about betrayed innocence, murder, dangerous adventures, war, farming, crime, punishment, violence, death, labor, individualism, outlaws, marriage, love, humor, trickery, economic exploitation, righteous outrage, poverty, hatred, and revenge. But as you know when children move they take their material with them -- so it is a living poetry that speaks to the truth of children's lives, and prepares them for how the world works.
As in all literature, our indigenous playground poetry - our folk songs contain the same familiar human drama that characters explore in every narrative, in all cultures world wide. The same simple pleasures and conflicts of our ancestors are ever present within the human mind, and human community of today.
Teachers can facilitate learning environments and learning events that lead to the eventual use of higher order thinking and the very very important assimilation and ability to transfer those skills out of the initial learning environment, but knowledge must precede application which precedes all important higher level thinking skills.
Every culture has its own indigenous music. I am sure you have heard people say that music is the universal language. All cultures are hard-wired for the language of music. And children's indigenous music that we call folk song is a culturally diverse national treasure, and was first collected by grammy winner Allan Lomax and archived in the Library of Congress.
Listen and find the music of the text (speech)
Through the music find the rhythm
Through the rhythm you will understand the meaning of the words . . .
Review the Research
The parts of the brain that control hand movement and speech sounds are very close together.
A baby's perception of the rhythmic pattern is a key mechanism that launches the process of human language acquisition. Babbling results from the baby's sensitivity to specific patterns at the heart of language, like the sing-song patterns that bind syllables, the tiny units of language, into words and sentences. Rhythmic patterns underlie the human language. The sing song way in which parents speak to their baby, the lullaby, finger play, and rhyming games common to nursery rhymes at home and in school, are more important for a child's developing brain than we ever imagined, and they provide an important tool for the young child to discover the grammar and structure of her native language.
The Human Hand is the Beginning of Language
Gestures are country independent. Language evolves and changes with children, and gesture is an integral part of language. All aboriginal people knew the hand as the beginning of language because hands represents the function of differentiating self from other, inside from outside.
Communication evolved hand-in-hand with social bonding. Hand Gestures link the inner world of the mind and consciousness with the outer world of experience and physicality. Our hands, project our conscious will (inside our mind-space), onto the physical world (outside) projecting us from one state into another. We use our hands to implement our conscious choices in the world and we are still using our hands and gestures in children's hand clapping games from antiquity until this very day.
WHY DO CHILDREN SING?
Hear Children Singing - The voices of children along with nearby birds.
Many animals, Musician Bernie Krause argues, [ The Origin of Interspecies Language ] have evolved to squeeze their vocalizations into available niches of the soundscape in order to be heard by others of their kind. Evolution isn't just about the competition for space or food but also for bandwidth. If a species cannot find a sonic niche of its own, it will not survive.OUR OWN "JOHNNY APPLE SOUND SEEDS"
Help Children connect with their own kind and promote listening to their own voices singing on the playgrounds.Children's speech starts with music. Speech is the beginning of formal language. Do you remember any of these Hand Games?