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Piano sheet music for kids · Children's song · Level 3: Notes below middle C
Three Little Kittens
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 8 bars and a pickup. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The kittens in their mittens, in 6/8, with the short tune printed in The Baby’s Bouquet in 1878. It starts on a pickup of two quick semiquavers (sixteenth notes), “There were”, on the G below middle C. The hand sits with the thumb on that G and the other fingers on B, C, D and E, skipping A, so every note is under a finger. “Lit-tle” is two more semiquavers in bar 1. The last four bars are the kittens’ “Mew”, seven long notes, played softly. The left hand plays a low G and then a chord on each big beat, C and G7.
Practice tip: Say “there-were THREE lit-tle KIT-tens” and feel the two quick notes rush into the big beat. Play the “Mew” bars softly and smoothly, like a kitten asking for pie.
The words
There were three little kittens put on their mittens to eat some Christmas pie. Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew.
A short history
Three Little Kittens is number 16140 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The full rhyme, in which the kittens lose their mittens, find them, soil them with pie and wash them, is usually credited to the American writer Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787–1860), and appeared with her verses for children in the 1830s and 1840s. A shorter English version, in which the kittens simply put on their mittens to eat a Christmas pie, was in print by 1827, and Follen may have built her poem on it.
This arrangement uses that short version and its tune, as printed by Walter and Lucy Crane in The Baby’s Bouquet (London, 1878). The Everyday Song Book (Chicago, 1927), the American school songbook, printed the same tune and the same first verse half a century later.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English; tune as printed in The Baby’s Bouquet, 1878)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 8 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Playfully, dotted crotchet = 60
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 102 of 201)
- Type
- Children's song
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
Questions and answers
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