Toddler Favorites is appropriately named, as it is sure to quickly become one of your toddler's favorites. Each song has new silly voices presenting the familiar children's classics set to upbeat tempos with an array of instruments to keep young listener engaged, entertained, and - most importantly - learning.  The majority of songs also include toddlers singing along, which helps your little one relate and realize they can do it too! A great example is the first verse of The Wheels On The Bus, where a toddler sings alone without any music; he has trouble pronouncing his 'r's but keeps right on singing. The It's Raining/Itsy Bitsy Spider Medley also features a toddler struggling slightly to pronounce the words, but he continues singing with the beat. One of the female toddler singers in The More We Get Together gets excited and can be heard singing at the top of her lungs, far above the other voices. Her excitement will bring a smile to your face.  A handful of the tracks, such as Engine Number Nine and You're Fuzzy Wuzzy are rhyming spoken word instead of musical songs. These feel like short story times!  

Toddler Favorites also includes interactive play songs, like This Little Pig and Ring-Around-The-Rosy. The final verse of Ring-Around-The-Rosy speeds up considerably - can you keep up? Happy Birthday includes two surprise verses that your little one is sure to love and want to imitate; one verse is sung as a cat (only meowing) and another is sung as a puppy (only barking). You can extend this into a game of your own by naming different animals and seeing if your little one can sing like them. Can they oink or moo the whole song? It sure would be fun to try! Sticking with that same theme, you can have your little one name the next animals for each verse of Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Other learning opportunities include learning the Alphabet Song or demonstrating understanding of the word by miming out the actions in a song.  Can you little one 'reach way up in the sky and catch a falling star' in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?

My two-year-old friend Kyle particularly liked the song Monkeys On The Bed because we also have the book, which follows the song lyrics verbatim. We actually flipped through the storybook pages while listening to the song. It was so neat to see Kyle starting to putt the two forms of media together!

 

--Audra