Advent adventures: day 5

Today we opened the fifth drawer of our tabletop advent tree. Inside, my children found a tiny trinket to hang on one of its branches and a strip of paper upon which was written a fun and festive activity. There's one of these for every day of Advent - I know that for sure because I came up with the twenty-four ideas, lovingly wrote them out and carefully placed one in each of the tree's diminutive drawers. I'm going to attempt to take a photograph to represent each day's little Advent adventure and post them all here.

Day 5: Play along with some Christmas songs

Choose an instrument you can play

Last night Daisy explained, with great enthusiasm, a game her class had played in their music lesson that afternoon. Then she asked if we could all play it right away, please and went off to get our bag of toy instruments.

Daisy soon returned and carefully set out some drums, an egg shaker, the jingle bells, a swanee whistle, maracas and a tambourine on the floor. Then we were directed to sit in a circle and she taught us the game's song as we passed round an object (she used our toy Moomin Papa, as he was close to hand).

Here's the song - sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down

Choose an instrument you can play

You can play

You can play

Choose an instrument you can play

What's your favourite?

Whoever was holding Moomin Papa at the end of the song had to pick up an instrument and play along to the next part, stopping as instructed. Daisy added a fabulously ostentatious hand gesture to help, just like an orchestra's conductor; she'd clearly lifted this straight from her teacher - hilarious.

You can play and play and stop

Play and stop

Play and stop

You can play and play and stop...

She couldn't remember that last line, but was happy when we suggested

...That was lovely.

I am of course intrigued as to what the actual line might be but I've since been making myself chuckle by thinking of cheeky alternatives like ... stop it ple-ase. Or... I have a headache. Well, those percussion instruments can be rather cacophonous in small hands, can they not.

But the best, and rather more melodious, was yet to come. After we'd all had a couple of turns, they asked whether they could have a guitar lesson. As Daddy was not about to head off to work he happily obliged; as you can see they were transfixed.

They listened so carefully as he demonstrated how to make chord shapes and then they practised their strumming techniques assiduously.

Now, that really was lovely.