My Version of The 12 Days of Christmas

For any of you who have mastered the blog and are looking for a new challenge, I've got one for you. It's called podcasting. I learned about this last year at Teacher Convention--that's right the couple days you get off in the Spring while teachers still have to work--and thought it was a neat idea. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to invest in figuring out all the ins and outs of the podcast. I've played around a bit with it and over the weekend had a great thought to try doing a podcast and uploading it to my blog.

What a podcast does is allow you to record your thoughts and ideas as audio recordings and store them online where others can download those files to their computer or ipod or other device and listen to them. It's actually like a blog, but audio instead of written.

You can find out more about podcasts and look at a site that allows you to podcast here. One thing that is really cool about this site is that it lets you record your episode over the phone and the wonderful people at gcast do the work of putting it online for you (in a matter of minutes). As I said, I don't know a whole lot about this technology, but feel free to check it out and learn on your own. Then you can come and teach me.

Over the weekend I came up with the idea to rewrite the lyrics to The 12 Days of Christmas, and to use the theme of hunting, in honour of a lot of you here at Ridgevalley School. A bit of research later--into the song, the syllables of the lines, a tune-only version, and some lyric specific items--and I had my very own version of the song, audio and all, published to the internet using gcast.com.

Give the song a listen below.

***Caution: This is a song, and is sung by me, and I don't sing, and when my wife heard me singing she asked why and I said "no reason" and she said uh-oh, because I don't sing, but I am singing here, so . . . Caution!***



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Hunting is very popular here in Grande Prairie and the surrounding area. I first discovered this when a student had been missing from my class for a week and when he came back I asked where he had been and he said hunting. Wow! You miss a whole week of school to go hunting? I had never heard of that. But apparently that's what you do when you're in Peace Country. When I told another teacher about this he simply said he wished he could take a week off and go hunting. Since then I have heard speeches about hunting, read stories about hunting, and viewed student blogs dedicated to hunting. It is big business out here, and a lot of you either own a gun or are looking forward to when they are old enough to own a gun. Even the girls. I was asked by a student what the biggest gun I ever fired was. I said I had fired a 9mm Glock at the shooting range in West Edmonton Mall . . . once. He laughed and said "that's it?"

This song evolved into a list of weapons the gun store would sell me to help me kill the buck in my sights; though, being the city-guy I am, none of the weapons actually would enable me to do it, which is why they keep compounding and culminate in a death-ray.

By the way, laugh all you like at the song, my singing, or whatever else you want, but until you write your own song, sing it to the music from this site, and have the guts to post it on your own blog for me to listen to, I will be proud of my efforts.

Merry Christmas!