COSTUME PARTY (tune E strings to D)
Chorus:
It’s a costume party, D(05777x)-A(7x7655),
and everyone is here! D-A-D
It’s a costume party, and everyone is here! D-A, D-A-D
You wear a blue dress, you, red sneakers; A-D
You wear a suit and tie. A-D
You wear flowers, you wear stripes-- A-D
You put make-up on your eyes! E(222300)-A-Asus4-A
Chorus
You wear brown skin, you wear white,
Your head is clean and bare.
You poked holes through your earlobes;
You’ve got a wart, I bet, somewhere!
Or maybe you dye your hair!?
Chorus
We may be blind, or we wear glasses.
We st-stutter when we talk.
Sometimes our ears just do not hear
Or we use wheels when we walk!
Chorus
Our disguises could win prizes-
Each one’s qualified.
But the only thing that really matters
Is who we are inside!
Chorus/ Chorus
Written by Peter Alsop, ©1987 Moose School Music(BMI)
On Pluggin’ Away, Pie In The Sky & Costume Party DVD - www.peteralsop.com
Teaching tips:
First I teach them the chorus.
Then I get the audience to clap once after we say "costume party" the first time, and twice after we say "and everyone is here!"
Afterward, we talk about how a grumpy face can be a costume. And how a happy face all the time can be too! We take paper plates and make a mask for the bottom, then on the other side, we draw a kind of feeling that the outside of the mask could be hiding. Kids are surprisingly hip to all these kinds of nuances in interpersonal interactions, even when they don't have the words to describe them. I try to give them useful ways to see why people might hide inside a "costume", (to protect themselves, and then sometimes, even though it might be a kind of protection, it can create another problem, because people don't know you're in there!) And we all have costumes!
CMN's Multicultural Songbook is an anthology of some of the best songs originating from (or about) countries beyond the United States, often sung in languages other than English. In sharing songs of other cultures, we broaden the global understanding of our children so that they might see themselves as part of a larger world of people, not so unlike themselves, who hope, dream, play and learn in far-away lands sometimes in unfamiliar--but equally interesting--languages.