Doggy Do Re Mi Song

When you play this Doggy Do Re Mi song you do need either a doggy glove puppet, or small soft toy dog. Then you can take a back seat and let the puppet take the class!

Puppets are fantastic tools for teaching, and kids always love engaging with any activity when invited by a little dog or a bear. It’s amazing how a puppet can encourage even very shy children to take part.

Getting Ready

To play this game you do need some chime bars, but they are well worth buying if you want to do music at home with your kids. They provide an instant beautiful sound that anyone can play. Very young children love singing simple seesaw songs but they’re still challenging for children of 7 or 8 who are learning to read music and making up songs.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a puppet, a soft toy dog can work just as well.

How to play the Doggy Do Re Mi song

This game teaches children the degrees of the solfege scale (Do, Re Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do). It teaches the correct order, the solfege colours and how they sound.
First, you set the chime bars out in the incorrect order. Make sure that they are jumbled up and don’t sound right – they find this quite amusing!
Then let the children have a little chat with the doggy puppet. He can ask them to help him sort out the colours because he gets them mixed up and can’t remember which one is which.
Starting with Do (red) the dog says ” who knows which one is red?” he can then give the children a couple of clues to prompt them to guess the right colour (e.g the same as a tomato). The child who answers correctly can then choose the red one and place it first. If they don’t get it right straight away, just prompt them with some more clues.
Continue the game in this way, giving clues for each colour in the correct order as seen above whilst making sure that each child has a go and sets them out correctly . If they find it difficult to guess all of the colours, you can use some little toys or bricks to help them match the tricky ones.
Once all the chime bars are present and correct, the doggy sings the little song written out below, which goes up each note of the scale from low Do to high Do. Then he woofs all the way back down the scale from high Do to low Do.
It’s charming, because the children are convinced that they are helping the dog, but really he is prompting all the answers.

Hand signs and actions

After you’ve sung the song and played it on the chime bars, invite the children to have a go at playing it themselves. They can also make the doggy hop up from low to high like going up stairs and then back down again at the end. This introduces the idea of ascending and descending notes in preparation for reading music.
Any other children watching can copy the dog, by climbing with ascending hand actions as if they are hopping up the stairs too. This is also a good way to introduce the solfège hand actions for older children.