Songs they made you sing in elementary school

my middle school was unconventional at best

I am not making this up

"I adore you" wrote the lady cat
Who was fluffy, white, and nice and fat.
There was not a sweeter kitty, meow meow meow
In the country or the city, meow meow meow
And she said she'd wed Don Gato.

Oh, Senor Don Gato jumped with glee
He fell off the roof and broke his knee
Broke his ribs and all his whiskers, meow meow meow
and his little solar plexus, meow meow meow
"Ay carumba!" cried Don Gato

As the funeral passed the market square
The smell of fish was in the air
Though the funeral was slated, meow meow meow
He became re-animated, meow meow meow
He came back to life, Don Gato!

(this is how I learned what a solar plexus was)

That and "The Hokey Pokey".

I used to like a lot of those elementary school songs. I think my favorite was "Frog Went A-Courtin'" I think I must have identified with Frog. I remember one I really hated though: "Let the ball roll/Let the ball roll/It has to stop some time you know" meant to discourage kids from running into the street in pursuit of renegade baseballs, etc.

The provinces of Canada are fun to remember,fun to remember, fun to remember...(x2)
Come along and sing them with me...
Newfoundland and P.E.I;
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick;
Quebec, Ontario, from there you'll see Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, B.C.

To turn this topic on its head, once we were gathered into the hall for "a special treat", which turned out to be all the teachers butchering that song from the Kylie Minogue film "The Delinquents". We all bitterly complained as we left the hall that it was a Kylie song and not something by De La Soul. Mind you, that would have been even more embarrassing.

I wonder if anyone in the auditorium had actually seen the movie?

Great stuff, absolutely.

My Kawllidge roommate said that his elementary school choir tried to convince the teacher to let them sing "Night Moves". ("out in the backseat of my 60 Chevy")

Also, another one was "Jay Jay Coolay" "Jay jay coolay/Jay jay co vesah/co vee sa longa"

I have no idea what language it is or anything but we sang that one a lot.

Yellow bear with maaaa-tted hair
Come outside and breeeeaath (smell?) the air
Wintertime has gone...

Our music teacher (Mr. Foo) was a little on the crazy side, though.

For once, I'm speachless.

I have lots of amusing school assembly stories.

oklahoma or-e-gon pennsylvania, rhode island southcarolinasouthdakota tenn-e-ssee tex-aaaas!

utah, vermont, vir-giiiiiiin-ia washington westvirginiawisconsin and wy-oooooo-ming

i can recite the periodic table backwards also

god i am so cool

- brown girl in the ring
- blowin' in the wind

Everybody knows
where little children play
they need a helping hand
to grow straight and tall
let the sun shine through

We also sang Bright Eyes and Guantanamera.

One headteacher had a thing about wartime music hall numbers, so we all had to learn Roll Out the Barrel, In the Quartermaster's Store, My Old Man Said Follow The Van, When Father Painted the Parlor, etc. Which was better than the usual hymns, admittedly.

chickary chick chala chala
checkalaromy in a bananika
ballika wallika, can't you see
chikary chick is me

yeah apart from the usual hymns, we got to sing "chicken in the air" from spitting image at christmas time.

The most memorable to me was a 4th grade music class taught by a guy with a mustache and an acoustic guitar.

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
King of the Road
Obla-di Obla-da
Bad Bad Leroy Brown
etc

6th grade was my (only) year of guitar-strumming music teacher -- a young nun.

"bridge over troubled water" was the only pop song, the rest were these "folk mass" love-your-brother songs. at summer camp the counselors led us in all kinds of rock and roll sing-alongs to stuff like "satisfaction" and "feel-like-Im-fixin-to-die" by country joe and the fish.

Bad Bad Leroy Brown

Always this...

Edmund Fitzgerald seems really long for a bunch of 4th graders!

Don Gato was terrifyingly sad for me.

Broke his ribs and all his whiskers, meow meow meow
and his little solar plexus, meow meow meow

:' (

A handful of Beatles songs - Yellow Submarine, Ob-La-Di, When I'm 64. No Tomorrow Never Knows or Revolution 9, unsurprisingly.

I was over at my to-be brother-in-law's house the other day and he asked his kids "who was the greatest rock band in the world?" and they both go "The Beatles!!!"

"Let the ball roll/Let the ball roll/It has to stop some time you know" meant to discourage kids from running into the street in pursuit of renegade baseballs, etc.

Oh man I SO want to hear this song.

I am imagining it to the tune of 'Let the Wind Blow' by the Beach Boys.

Oh, this is a wonderful idea for a thread. I feel very fortunate that I got turned on to the Beatles at school. California Dreaming is another thing they had us sing. We had a hippie-ish music teacher.

Pretty sure I never heard that Canadian provinces song mentioned above, and definitely sure I never sang it, so cybele is probably considerably older or younger than me.

I think my favourite song to sing was "Robin in the rain/Such a saucy fellow/Robin in the rain/Mind your boots of yellow"

I was just thinking about this because for some reason I had "oh row the rattlin' bog" stuck in my head the other day a good 25 years after singing it in school.

also we had all these anti-drug life-affirming songs we sang:

"i've got my very own paid of designer genes/
how do they make me look/
i've got my very own paid of designer genes/
didn't come from a catalog book/
i didn't choose them, they chose me/
i guess they couldn't resist/
but they suit me fine, and you gotta agree/
no other genes look quite like this"

"go for a natural high! high! high! high!/
when you are feeling down low/
if you like running, then go out and run/
it's a way to get high, and it's safe and it's fun/
if you prefer take a swim/
climb a high dive and jump in"

did anyone else sing those?

*very own pair

"Don Gato", "Wade In The Water", "Kumbaya", and when we had the cool young substitute, the entire Carpenters songbook and "American Pie"...

i can remember the boys in my 6th or 7th grade class singing 'out of touch' by hall & oates and the girls singing 'la isla bonita' by madonna. there were other weird, possibly inappropriate contemporary pop songs we sang as well but i don't remember them. i think one might have been 'wanted dead or alive' by bon jovi?

5th grade:

Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)

I'd like to thank the guy who wrote the song
that made my baby fall in love with me...
Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp
Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong
Who put the bop in the bop-she-bop-she-bop
Who put the dip in the dip-de-dip-de-dip
Who was that man, I'd like to shake his hand
He made my baby fall in love with me (yeah!)
When my baby heard bomp-bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp-bo-bomp-bomp
Every word went right into her heart
And when she heard them singing ram-a-lama-lama-lama-lama-ding-dong
She said we'd never have to part

We even wore poodle skirts and did some choreographed dance.

One of the weirdest moments in my life was once when I was eight and at day care, and a half dozen other boys and I spontaneously started singing the Theme to the Greatest American Hero.

We were just sitting on the couch, waiting for our momz, when one kid started going "Look what happened to me..." and everyone else joined in.

Also I play the violin and in orchestra we always got to play some random "rock" stuff. I remember really liking the violin parts for "Eleanor Rigby" though.

x-post Wait that's the Believe it or not I'm walking on air . . . one, right?

Believe it or not, it's just meeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

oh we sang that one too

My friend Kevin and I often end up singing that song together uh . . . now. Six eight yr olds doing it simultaneously though . . . pretty awesome.

It's a really fun song to sing!

Red and yellow and pink and green
Purple and orange and blue
You can sing a rainbow
Sing a rainbow
Sing a rainbow, too!

wha-

I mean, even when I was 10 that song made no sense but when I think back on it now it really feels like our music teacher was making us sing a love song to acid.

What about John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt?

Low Bridge - The Eerie Canal Song?

Sing a rainbow

In secondary school I was in the top year, and my brothers in the bottom year. One day my history teacher, from the vantage point of a window on the third floor, looking down at the playground, said 'What the hell's going on there?'

Naturally we crowded round the window and I could see Mr Tompkinson, chemistry teacher, standing in the centre of a circle of children, one of whom was one of my brothers, who were walking round him, while he shouted at them.

Later I asked my brother what on earth had been going on. He reminded me that Mr Tompkinson had had a car accident in which he had taken a bump on the head and had only returned to school a couple of weeks previously.

My brother then went on to explain that they would regularly hide equipment in the classroom to make Mr Tompkinson think he had amnesia. He was behaving quite erratically anyway, apparently, increasingly so.

Then one day, Mr Tompkinson was talking about prisms and asked what colours you could see. No one could be bothered to answer, or perhaps they genuinely didn't know, anyway, he completely snapped and started shouting about rainbows.

Then he got everyone to file out of the classroom, stand in the playground and walk in a circle round him singing I Can Sing A Rainbow while he yelled 'SING IT! SING IT! RED! AND YELLOW! AND PINK! AND GREEN!' etc.

He retired shortly after.

wau

I would love if my music teacher made us do that

oh it was a chem teacher - my high school chemistry teacher dressed up as cher and sang "I Got You Babe" with a student who dressed up as sonny bono. it was kinda extremely creepy and I remember making a point of not looking b/c she was dressed like '80s cher style w/fishnets and stuff. I'm surprised the (relatively conservative) school admins didn't flip their shit

in my french class we had to sing some song titled "je suis un hamburger"

nm the song was "je suis un pizza"

i found the songs i was talking about!! i've only been looking for them for 15+ years. my post is the first thing i find in google so it's destiny.

god bless youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbU6FXcSYiI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsvzyph5esA