Milwaukee music teacher posts daily YouTube singalongs
As parents and teachers scramble to provide online learning resources and homework packets to kids who are home during the COVID-19 crisis, Milwaukee music teacher Meaghan Heinrich is taking a different approach.
“When someone is singing live — or as close to live as you can get with social distancing — that’s different than just getting an activity to do,” said Heinrich. “Seeing a friendly face singing and dancing, and joining along with them, bridges that distance a little bit when we can’t be with our friends.”
That’s why Heinrich, a Wisconsin Conservatory of Music faculty member, started a YouTube series, “Stuck at Home.” Every day at 1 p.m. for as long as school is out, she’s releasing a 5- to 8-minute video of her singing a fun family song, while dancing and playing the ukulele.
In her first video, posted on Monday, her 8-year-old son, Paul, joined in. Her 6-year-old daughter, Margie, was too shy to appear in the video, but when the positive responses started flooding in, she changed her tune.
“Two parents of my daughter’s friends watched the first video with Paul and asked where Margie was,” said Heinrich. “When Margie realized her friends were looking for her, she was like, ‘OK, I’ll be in the next one.’ ”
As Heinrich was planning for that next one, which took place on St. Patrick’s Day, she asked her students and other kids to suggest clever traps to catch a leprechaun — a tradition she just became aware of a few years ago and has incorporated into her music classes ever since.
She got several suggestions, including using a mousetrap, a rope and box and a button the leprechaun can step on to release a trap.
“My favorite was the kid who wants to catch the leprechaun in a net and then eat some waffles with him for breakfast,” Heinrich said, laughing.
Heinrich added a few of the suggestions, along with the kids’ names, into the song she released on March 17 — “What shall we do with a tricky leprechaun.”
The song is sung to the tune of “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor.” Heinrich has always loved the song, and thought it would be fun to sing with her classes. She changed the lyrics to something more appropriate for her first-grade target audience.
The target audience for Heinrich’s “Stuck at Home” series is similar to the kids she normally teaches at Whittier and Samuel Clemens schools, with the addition of older brothers and sisters as well as moms, dads and other adult caregivers.
Her extended audience is something Heinrich is keeping in mind as she chooses songs for her series.
“I’ve tried to think of songs that little kids could enjoy, but weren’t littlekid songs,” said Heinrich. “I’ve got some folk songs as well as more contemporary songs like the Beatles, anything with a repeating chorus that people will find it easy to sing along to.”
Heinrich wants her song choice to appeal to a wide audience because she wants her videos to be something that the whole family does together, rather than just something to keep the kids busy on their own.
“Several people have already reached out to me to say how emotional these videos make them,” said Heinrich. ‘It’s nice to see the whole family together, reaching out to other families and bridging that distance to make a connection.”
Contact Amy Schwabe at (262) 8759488 or amy.schwabe@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @WisFamilyJS, Instagram at @wisfamilyjs or Facebook at WisconsinFamily.