We're Back...and with Eleven Holidays!

Hi, I seem to have taken the summer off from blogging, but I'm back and ready to report on the exciting inner world of an tiny independent school publisher.

In my last entry I was asking for suggestions on what John and I ought to be writing about. We received at least a hundred emails and phone calls telling us what you need in your classroom. The tricky part is there are a lot of different needs, and it's difficult to tell how many other teachers share your specific problem.

So we talked about it endlessly over a couple of months and came up with the three plays for the 2007-08 school year. The first one is coming out in a couple of days and I want to tell you about it.

Bad Wolf's Holiday Song's for the Classroom isn't a play at all, but brief songs and skits for eleven school year celebrations. It's specifically aimed at grades K-2, which are certainly the age group we tend to ignore. But not now.

The celebrations include Halloween, Martin Luther King Day, Thanksgiving, the first and last days of school, Presidents' Day, Earth Day, and Memorial Day. We wrote two songs for some of the celebrations and just one for most of them---we've a total of 15 songs here.

Would you like to hear one? Here's Dana Shaw singing about the first Thanksgiving: (You might have to copy and paste this address into your browser.)

http://www.badwolfpress.com/three_day_harvest_feast.mp3

Did you notice that the instruments are just piano, bass, and percussion? I decided to do this entire recording this way. I'd never done this before, and that seemed like a great reason to try it. I think some of the arrangements are pretty interesting, and hope you think so.

Here's one of our Halloween songs, sung by Tanya Wright, who is new to Bad Wolf:

http://www.badwolfpress.com/whatcha_gonna_be.mp3

And how about a song for Martin Luther King Day. This is sung by Brenda Tzipori, who has been performing on our recordings for several years:

http://www.badwolfpress.com/there_was_a_time.mp3

Let me know what you think of these songs. I'll be telling you more quite soon.
Ron