I cannot sing. I want that on the record before I tell you to sing, because otherwise this is the sort of advice that arrives from people who can, and is therefore worthless.
My voice is somewhere between a hinge and a cough. And I have sung to children, badly, for fifty years, and not one of them has ever complained.
Children are not an audience
This is the thing nobody tells you. A child under about seven does not evaluate your singing. They have no framework for it. What they hear is a familiar person making a shape they can predict, which is roughly what a lullaby is, and roughly why it works.
The judging starts around eight or nine, and by then they will be singing over you anyway.
Why the song does more than the story
A fable read aloud goes in once. A fable sung goes in and stays, and comes back out in the car three weeks later.
The reason is rhythm. A tune is a container, and a child who has the container can carry the words without trying. This is not my theory, it is why every culture on earth teaches its alphabet with a melody, and why you can probably still sing an advertising jingle from 1974 while forgetting what you came into the kitchen for.
Four things that help a tuneless adult
- Let the recording carry the tune, and talk under it. You are not the performance, you are the company.
- Lower it. Most people sing to children too high, in the register they think a song ought to be in. Drop it until it is comfortable and the strain goes out of your voice.
- Slow down. Children want the words, not the tempo. A song at three quarters speed is a song they can join.
- Stop singing sometimes, mid-line. Leave the last word of a couplet for them. That gap is where the child stops listening and starts participating, and it is also, quietly, an early reading skill.
The karaoke, and what it is really for
There are twenty-six karaoke videos in the set, one per fable, with the words on screen and a highlight moving along them.
I did not build those for the singing. I built them because a child who is learning to read will follow a moving highlight without noticing that they are reading. They think they are singing. They are decoding text at speed with a tune holding them up. It is the least honest teaching I have ever done and by some distance the most effective.
A confession about the recordings
The songs on the set are properly recorded, by people who can actually sing, which is a decision I made after listening to myself once and never again.
But when my grandchildren's generation hears them, the version they will remember is not the recording. It is the one their tuneless grandfather did in the kitchen while making toast, getting the words wrong. That is the version that becomes theirs.
So do not wait until you can sing. That day is not coming, and it is not required.
The twenty-six songs and karaoke videos come with the full set, $49.95 during the launch.
Tomorrow, the harder version of this: singing with twenty-four children at once, which is a different sport entirely. And if you want something free to start with tonight, the colouring posters are here.