This week, Year 4 learnt the famous nursery rhyme ‘Frère Jacques’. This song is a nursery rhyme about ‘Jacques’ (or ‘John’ in the English verse), a monk who has overslept. The lyrics are telling him to wake up and sound the bell for midnight or very early morning prayers, which a monk would be expected to wake for. It is a song with many possible origins, first published around the turn of the 19th century.
After learning Frère Jacques, each class sung it as a ’round’. A round is when one voice or instrument performs a melody, followed by another performer who joins in a few bars later, playing exactly the same melody underneath.
We then learnt how to play the song on our glockenspiels. You can see how we got on below!
