The Harvesting Our Crops Music Curriculum Album for Young Children is part of the Planting Our Seeds Curriculum Series that introduces Jazz elements through vocal harmonies, piano, and special guitar accompaniment.

The Harvesting Our Crops Curriculum Album released in 2018, is a sequel to the Planting Our Seeds Curriculum Album for Young Children released in 2015. The curriculum albums are designed to teach children about basic music fundamentals, the names of harvest foods, the process of planting seeds and growing food, and the scientific processes of seasons and weather patterns, which effect the kinds of food that can be produced around the world.

Special thanks to Bob Ledwell, who is featured on guitar in Down by the Bay, and Brian Effinger, whose guitar work is featured on Mr. Sun, The Rain Song, Pollination, and Ring-a-Round the Rosy. Also, a special thank you to the recording and production talents of Brad McCarthy.

Down by the Bay, Mr. Sun, and Apples and Bananas are songs that were popularized by one of the most recognized, professional children’s musicians in the world, Raffi. The Best of Raffi was released in 2017 under the population music category for children.

Pollination is sung to the melody of the Frere Jacques or Are You Sleeping song.

Rain, Rain, Go Away is a famous English Language nursery rhyme for children. The song was written during the war between the English and Spanish people. The origin of the song date back to the period of English history when there was constant rivalry between Spain and England that led to the Spanish Armada in 1588. The stormy weather and the swift nature of the smaller English ships helped to defeat the great Spanish Armada. The stormy weather was the rain. There are many different versions of the Rain song, including the one on this album, and all versions can be used as game songs with young children.

Ring-a-Round the Rosy - None of the versions fit the plague interpretation very well, but they do reveal other functions and meanings: the rhyme is often used as a playful courtship game in which children dance in a ring, then suddenly stoop, squat, curtsey (“curchey”), or in some cases fall to the ground. The last to do so had to profess love for someone. In some versions, this child then takes up a place in the middle of the ring, representing the “rosie” or rose bush. Newell (1883) explicitly states that the game was played like this in America in the 1880s, and European analogs from the same time and later are similar. In many versions, then, the roses and posies signify what flowers often signify in traditional European culture: not suffering and death, but joy and love. This interpretation emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and has become widespread, but it has never been accepted by folklorists, for several reasons. Like most folklore items, this rhyme exists in many versions and variants. The earliest reported versions are cited in William Wells Newell's Games and Songs of American Children (1883).