Vance Bollinger – Curious George: Christmas Carols

Traditional Christmas carols

Illustrated by H. A. Rey

This picture book is a collection of Christmas songs, as illustrated by H. A. Rey, the author/illustrator of the Curious George series.  I really like that Rey included George in each songs’ illustration, because would be really exciting for a young reader.  I remember learning to read and being introduced to Curious George books.  Singing about him would be a great way to connect literacy and music in a general music classroom (k-8).

When I’ve heard about graphic music notation before, I imagined lines and shapes.  H. A. Rey has a different interpretation of this method of writing music.  He assigned different shapes to each song, each with a Christmas theme.  Some pages use a series of holy leaves, and other songs use all Christmas lights.  The color filling in the shapes determines that shape’s rhythmic value.  It’s a blend of traditional notation too, because he uses the dots associated with normally notated notes and also the correct, five-lined staff along with the correct clefs, time signatures, and key signatures.  Consequently, this would be a great book for learning to decode real music, similar to decoding written English.