Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me!

It’s summer and insects abound! We have been inundated with flies this year, so what better way to deal with them than with a song! Ok….that sounds ridiculous, but there’s a method behind my madness.

I originally got this idea from music therapist, Kerry Cornelius’, blog post about Cinco de Mayo. After taping cute pictures of cartoon cockroaches to paddle drums, the group would sing the song, “La Cucaracha” and play the drums when musically cued. As she mentioned in her post, this activity works on goals of impulse control, following directions and attending.

One day, when I was at the Dollar Tree store, I found huge fly swatters and thought they would be fun to use with the song, “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me!”. I also purchased smaller fly swatters for my younger students. After taping pictures of cartoon flies (not as cute as Kerry’s cartoon cockroaches!) to paddle drums, we were ready to go! Since students were familiar with using mallets with their drums, we began with those so they could focus on the directions and not go crazy with the fly swatters. Once they went through it a couple of times with a mallet, I gave everyone fly swatters. While singing the chorus of “Shoo Fly”, students waited until the end of each line to play their drum on the word, “spat!” (or you could use the word, “swat”). When we sang the verse, we shifted to playing a steady beat. Then I extended out the word, “so”, while playing a fast rumble on my drum to get everyone’s attention again and to indicate we were going to change back to the original way of playing.

Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
For I belong to somebody. (SPLAT)

Verse: (Play steady beat)
I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star,
I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star.

Soooooooooooo………

Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
Shoo fly, don’t bother me, (SPLAT)
For I belong to somebody. (SPLAT)

Watch the video below to see some kiddos in action or click HERE:

For clients who are working on answering “wh” questions, this activity can be extended by asking a question such as, “What other insects do you see in the summer?”. For individuals with higher needs or for those working on making choices, I use pictures of insects when asking which insect they would like to sing about next. For non-verbal clients, the word, “splat”, can be recorded onto an AAC device or using the PlayButton app on an iPad/iPhone. “Splat” is a pretty funny sounding word when you hear it recorded on a device and my students seemed to get a huge kick out of playing and hearing it.

The huge fly swatters worked better for a large movement type of activity using the same song and swatting the floor. The regular size fly swatters were perfect to use with paddle drums.