Video: Aquidneck Students Bebop Best with Grammy Artist Red Grammer

Faculty and students were all seeing Red Friday at the , but this was positively a good thing. 

Red Grammer, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter whose children's songs have been heard throughout households and schools for nearly two decades, played two back-to-back concerts for Aquidneck Avenue students on Friday for the grade K-3 students. The special assembly was made possible through grants totaling $1,500 from the Middletown Education Collaborative (MEC) and Aquidneck School's Parent-Teacher Group, said Principal Michelle Fonseca.

The event also capped off Spirit Week for the Aquidneck School, in which students dressed to a theme each day, such as crazy hats, mix-and-match, and pajamas.

On Friday—you guessed it—they wore red.

For the Aquidneck School, "Bebop Your Best" has since become a motto as it's been worked into the school's positive behaviors program that reinforces traits and values such as good citizenship, doing your best and more, said Fonseca. For Spirit Week, students also received special dog tags stamped with the school's official rules to "Be Safe, Be Responsible, and Be Respectful," which Red happily wore on stage at the Aquidneck School.

Red's "Bebop Your Best: Music to Build Character By" was nominated for a Grammy in 2005. Additionally, the singer-songwriter was a featured artist on the 2005 Grammy-winning Best Musical Album for Children, “cEllabration: A Tribute To Ella Jenkins.”

A California resident, Red travels the country playing at standalone concerts, schools, community events and more. Reaching beyond the realm of nursery rhymes and fun, memorable songs, Grammer's songs set out to encourage positive behaviors in children, he explained during some down-time between Friday's sets.

Fonseca was thrilled to have host Red at the Aquidneck School, having utilized his songs in lessons back when she used to teach second graders.

Red finds live performances and interactions with the students critical in helping craft new songs when he returns to the recording studio, because it shows him what's fun—the most crucial element in writing songs for children, he said.

See more from that conversation and clips from his musical performance in the video in the image gallery at upper right, where Red sits down with school principal Michelle Fonseca to talk about music as a teaching tool and about the learning environment as a song-writing tool.

Red Grammer can be found at his website, www.redgrammer.com.