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I Had a Rooster: A Traditional Folk Song
A cumulative folk song involves a child who says "I had a rooster and the rooster pleased me..." and then creates a menagerie under a greenberry tree: cat, duck, cow, pig, sheep, and lion. The final addition to the raucous group is a baby who "went waah, waah." Young singers are encouraged to sing the growing list of creatures and their sounds in order. The ingenious page design was originated by Pete Seeger's stepmother, the musicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger, and it makes the order self-evident. Spiral bound durable pages offer a practical format for Vaccaro's vibrantly colored expressionistic paintings of a blond white child happily involved in imaginative play. Pete Seeger's two-page foreword embodies comments about collecting and sharing folk music and includes his original child-tested cumulative drawings for his rendition of the song with countless young audiences. The audioCD enclosed in the back of the book will give today's children a chance to hear Pete's version, along with two other songs recorded by Ruth's adult children Peggy and Mike, who is Vaccaro's father-in-law. ©2001 Cooperative Children's Book Center
Illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
CCBC Age Recommendation: Ages 3-8
Age Range:
Babies/Toddlers (birth – 3)
PreK-Early Elementary (Ages 4-7)
Format:
Picture book
Subjects:
Animals (Fiction)
Music and Musicians
Patterned text/Repetition
Publisher:
Viking
Publish Year: 2001
Pages: 28
ISBN: 0670035211
CCBC Location: Non-Fiction, 782 Seeger