The chagim (holidays) are coming up!
Day trips, and car rides, can be fun!
Usually, it's the kids who drive their parents crazy during car rides.
Unfortunately for my kids, I'm the one who drives them crazy!!
I love to sing "The bear climbed over the mountain!" My kids, of course, get annoyed before I repeat the song even once! (too bad for them!)
I also sing "100 bottles of beer on the wall." My stick-in-the-mud kids don't like that one either!
But I did find a way to get them into it.
In a stroke of parenting genious (if I do say so myself), I changed the song ever so slightly, to make it more interesting, and also educational.
No subterfuge, just a little creativity (you know, the product of desperation!)
Basically, the song goes like this:
"100 bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer.... if ______ of those bottles just happens to fall, ______ bottles of beer on the wall."
Traditionally, the first blank is a "one" and the second blank is simply n-1. Not very difficult. The song typically has 100 versus, and can fill up at least 10-15 minutes of travel time.
However, you can substitute any number in that first blank space, making the subtraction a bit more complicated, and cutting out any number of verses.
Since the kids never knew how many bottles of beer would fall at any given time, they had to pay attention, and figure out (quickly) how many bottles of beer were left, so that we could continue singing....
When we sing it this way, sometimes they are even willing to sing it twice!
Try it!
(and let me know how it worked for your family!)
Please daven (or send happy, healing thoughts) for RivkA bat Teirtzel.
With love and optimism,
RivkA
Sunday, September 21, 2008
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7 comments:
My youngest is terrible at subtraction, doing it your way would be torture for her!
But you brought back fond memories of the long rides up to camp...
Thanks alot RivkA, now I can't get the tune out of my head :>) (and I'm not even driving anywhere)
Love
Klara
Brilliant idea!
We actually sang "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" earlier today in the car on the road back from our rural home. You see, there's this big wooden cutout of a bear peeking over the top of a hill (advertising a nearby fruit stand) and DC always loves to sing the song as we go past!
I like it... and what about 2n-4(x+y), where n is the number of people in the car singing along with you, x is the number of bottles that fell last time, and y is the amount of time that's passed since the last time you sang the song?
I say, let's really keep them on their toes!
I like the subtraction idea. Have to try it sometime. Mostly we are amused in the car by dd A's made up verses to all sorts of familiar songs...
A variation on the bottles of beer song that my son B sang to his cousin, had the cousin laughing for about 1/2 hour, and then bursting out into more laughter the rest of the day, whenever he thought about it again:
"....if one of those bottles should happen to fall, what a waste of alcohol!"
(Of course the disadvantage of this version is that the song ends very quickly...)
Baila -- that is why I made up the game. One of my kids had a really hard time with subtraction! My kids took turns, and I made the subtraction easier or more difficult, depending on the kid.
Klara -- dontcha' hate it when that happens?!
Muse -- thanks!
Shevy -- love it!! (don't know who DC is)
ALN -- ROTFL
Louise -- my son just taught me a new ending: "no more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer, go to the store, buy some more, 100 bottles of beer on the wall..."
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