Songs About Special Places from Erin Lee and Marci

Children’s musicians Erin Lee and Marci bring us the next of their regular posts with thematic recommendations for kid-friendly music, plus activities to make the songs an interactive experience for the whole family.

Look for Erin Lee and Marci here on the first Monday of each month, or visit their homepage, www.gottaplay.org.

I’ve created links to Amazon for the full albums (click the album image or name), plus links to Amazon MP3 downloads, when available, for those who want only the singles. (Click the song name.) I also have a widget after the jump that will let you preview most of the songs without leaving Mombian.

Everyone needs his or her own special place – somewhere you can go to just spend time with yourself. You’re lucky if you’ve got your own special room to go to, or chair to sit in, or tree to hide in. Sometimes you have to be intrepid and make your own special place, like a fort. Here are some of our favorite songs, running the gamut from rambunctious to mellow, that explore special places.

“Fort” (Recess Monkey, Field Trip)

On “a rainy day in Seattle” Recess Monkey (with a little help from Sis) gleefully builds the fort to end all forts! This joyfully infectious song will have you pulling your couch apart to build your own fort or “castle or rocket”. And, as Recess Monkey points out, it also gives you a chance to find all sorts of things hidden in your sofa cushions, like lost toys or money. Put this tune on, grab a partner and get building!

“Getting In A Treetop” (Gustafer Yellowgold, Mellow Fever (DVD+CD))

This song is quite simply a celebration of trees and the unique perspective of life from up above. All alone up in a tree, the narrator (who happens to be a little, yellow, cone-headed creature from the sun) experiences a whole new way of looking at things:

Getting in a treetop high above the lawn
With nothing in the way
You can see happy
You can feel change

The sense of wonder and peace is something we can all share, regardless or whether or not we have a yellow cone-head. It’s been years since we’ve climbed a tree, but we think we’ll be climbing one soon. . . .

Our Song of the Month:
“My Treehouse” (Erin Lee & Marci, Snowdance)

You don’t need power tools to build all of the different houses in this tune. The “houses” in our song are built with imagination and inspiration – and the occasional hammer, couch cushion, and bed sheet. The narrators build tree houses, couch forts and bunk bed ships — their own private sanctuaries where they can “read or dream or play”, no matter what their “real” houses look like.

Get the song off the iPod and into life:

Do Something New: The narrators in this song use things that are in their homes and pretend that they are other things—like pretending a bunk bed is a pirate ship! Pick an object (a book, a ruler, a ball, etc.) and come up with something else that it could be used as (a book could be a hat, a stepladder or a seat cushion, etc.) Set a timer for two minutes and see how many things you can come up with before time runs out!

Do Something You Haven’t Done in YEARS: Make a fort!

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