You can still sing an advertising jingle from your childhood. You cannot remember what you came into the kitchen for. That is not a joke about age, it is how memory works, and it is the entire argument for books that come with songs.
What the tune actually does
A melody is a container. It holds words in an order and hands them back later, whole, without being asked.
A child who hears a story remembers the shape of it. A child who sings a story remembers the words. And because rhyme forces the words into a fixed pattern, they cannot drift, which is why nursery rhymes have survived three hundred years of being passed mouth to mouth with almost no damage.
What to look for
Not every book that claims music is worth having. Three questions.
- Is the song the story, or an extra? A song that summarises a book you have already read adds nothing. A song that is the story does the work twice.
- Can a child sing it? Range matters more than tune. If it goes above a child's comfortable octave they will listen and never join, and joining is the point.
- Is it a subscription? A great many "audio included" products now mean audio for as long as you keep paying. Check before, not after.
Ones that hold up
Traditional nursery rhyme collections with a CD or a QR code. Unfashionable and unbeatable. The rhymes have been tested by centuries, and the tunes are already in your head, so you can sing them without preparation.
Anything by Raffi, for the under-fives. Simple, low, singable by an adult who cannot sing.
Books built on an existing song. Wheels on the Bus, Old MacDonald, the ones where the book is a printed version of a thing children already know. A two-year-old can join these on the first reading, which nothing else achieves.
Picture books that turn out to be songs. Julia Donaldson wrote songs before she wrote books, and you can hear it. Her rhythm is a musician's rhythm, and children respond to that even when nobody is singing anything.
What mine does
Sing Me a Fable has twenty-six fables and twenty-six songs, one for each, plus a karaoke video with the words on screen and a moving highlight.
The songs are not summaries of the fables. Each one is the fable, in a form a five-year-old can carry around, which means a child who cannot yet read a page can still have the whole story in their head by Thursday.
The karaoke exists for a different reason, and it is the sneakier one. A child following a highlight is reading, at speed, with a tune holding them up, and they think they are singing. I have written about that trick before and I am not ashamed of it.
The set is $49.95 during the launch. The songs are yours, not rented, and there is no subscription attached to any part of it.
The cheapest version of this advice
Sing whatever you already know, tonight, badly. The book is optional. The habit is not.
And if you want the fable animals without spending anything, the twenty-six colouring posters are free.