For part 3 of his learning activities, I’ll like to talk about Music.

Music has always been a part of our education with him. From the time when he was in the womb, we have been talking to him and singing songs to him every night at 9pm. Daddy will sing three Chinese songs and I will sing three English ones. I also play classical music to him every morning.

After he was born, we started with the rotating musical bear mobile which plays classical music.

Then in January,we decided to get some chinese children songs to play to him and found this box of cds with 6 cds, “绮丽的童年” in a bookstore. It consists mostly of our favourite children songs e.g. “小白船，小毛驴”, songs that we knew how to sing by heart. Even if we don’t exactly know the lyrics, a lyric booklet was provided and we enjoyed singing to Darius using that.

Before I had the picture books, I was using these cds to play for him during mealtimes so I can sing along while feeding him. Later, he was listening to them a few times while he was in the walker. I realised though that he didn’t concentrate on them as much because the songs weren’t as upbeat, the tunes sounded similar.

When he could drink his milk by himself, I let him listened to the Darius CD we got for him. The upbeat songs piqued his interest especially with the very first word being, “DARIUS!” I realised that he enjoyed listening and could be trusted to drink to the last drop while I’m away doing chores.

Over the weekend, we decided to get English songs and also story cds to listen to. I read from a mummy’s blog that she got her child english story cds from the library to listen to and her speech was very advanced at one year old. Hence, I was inspired to try this on Darius too.

The ‘Sing Along Karoake‘ was just one out of the many cds but we chose it because it can be played both ways, through watching or just listening.  I wanted something to just listen so I played to him by switching off the tv. The songs are sung by children and the music is very upbeat. It’s a cd produced by the local company, Innoform and the english is asian-sounding. The graphics are okay to me only because I draw animation so it’s not to up my standard with the characters repeating the same movements or just head swinging, arms moving.They also made up songs as some songs have lyrics that I have never heard before.

This song is cute and I can’t get the lyrics out of my head. It’s so catchy.

“Elephant, Elephant, why is your nose so long? That’s because my Mother’s nose is also very long. Elephant, Elephant, who do you like most of all? Let me see, I think I like my Mother most of all.”

The moment I switch on this cd for Darius while he was in the walker, he walked near to the source and started dancing suddenly. It was hilarious to watch him. He went on for quite sometime that I was able to take a video of him in time. He continued ‘dancing’ to the following song too. I have never seen him doing this before for other music so it was really funny. I’m glad he liked what we chose.

We also have the Baby Genius- Favourite Sing-A-Longs produced by the same company which I occasionally play for Darius to watch because the graphics are really good. Very animated and 3D.

Storybook CDs

We passed by this Popular bookfair last weekend and noticed these collection of storybook DVDs ($15.90 each but $30 for two) with Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairytales. The package comes with one CD for listening in both English and Mandarin, one cartoon VCD for watching and a storybook with words in both English and Chinese.

They had an entire collection of 32 stories and sold in two sets. The first set contains familiar stories like ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’ etc. We were tempted because it’s cheaper than if you buy them one by one. But we hadn’t tried it on Darius yet so Hubby suggested getting only one of the story pack from the list of stories in the second set so in the future, we could buy the entire first set without duplication if this is good. The stories from the second set isn’t as popular and I managed to choose “The Gingerbread Man” which comes with “The Three Lucky Brothers“.

I have been playing the story CD for Darius since Monday in English. I find that I love listening to it too.. hee. The drawings in the graphical VCD are quite okay though they don’t animate much but I will probably only use that later.

What I like is that the speaker has perfect British English (Mandarin speaker is China-Chinese) and the sound effects are good. Example, there’s a rooster in the story, they will have a rooster crowing and when people walk, they will have footsteps.

After each story, there’s even a song summarising the story with a nice cheerful tune. The singers sound local though cos there’s no accent. It made Darius curious and listened attentively to the sounds while drinking his milk. (Sometimes so attentive, he stopped drinking >.<”)

I’m not hoping he’ll understand the English story at his age or know how to sing along. The theory is like why we read to our child even though he doesn’t understand it yet. (see article “Reading Books to Babies“) Our aim is to expose him to languages, rhymes with words and rhythm with a role model to follow (a demo) so he can know how it sounds and read when he is able to.

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