Product Review: Fridge Phonics by LeapFrog

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My wife and I went to our first pre-school tour a couple months ago. We live in Los Angeles and had been frightened into action by a friend who was visiting for coffee. The friend was admonishing us for waiting so long to start the waiting list process. After all, Zoe was already eighteen months old. For all intents and purposes, we were “too late to get into any good schools.” The way she said it made it sound as though we had consigned our daughter to a lifetime in the service industry after four years at a community college because the only choice left to us was the J. W. Gacy Clown-Around pre-school.

Before calmer heads had the chance to talk some sense into us we found ourselves in the office of one of the more prestigious pre-schools in the Los Angeles area. The children in this school system graduate to the next level with an average 85% or higher. They don’t mess around here. Only a handful of students per teacher. No holiday is celebrated or hailed so as not to leave anyone out. And the children are not forced into narrow cubbies when they are bad, though a few of them looked like they should be.

What really stood out to me though was when the principal sat us down to give us the low-down. I’ll skip all the details and get to the salient point:

“It used to be,” She said, sternly. “That children came to Pre-K to get ready for Kindergarten, where they would learn the alphabet and their numbers. Nowadays, children come to pre-school already knowing their alphabet and our job is to further enhance their experience to get them ready for a world where they are already ahead of the curve.”

Yipes. When did pre-school get so…advanced? When I was in Nursery school (as we called it) we played Duck, Duck, Goose! Now, the kids are practically pre-algebra! Daunting to say the least. But not impossible to overcome and I’m gonna tell you how we did it.

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Because it was remarkably simple and our daughter seems to be a genius.

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Albeit a genius who craps her pants and thinks cheesy poofs are part of the four food groups.

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CD Review: The Boogers, “Road to Rock”

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The Boogers – Road to Rock (2008, Spire)
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Putting together a kids’ version of a band whose music celebrated eternal adolescence might seem like a rather pointless thing to do, but don’t be so quick to write off the Boogers — as it turns out, making Ramones-inspired music for grade schoolers is a pretty good idea, and Road to Rock (patterned, from the cover on down, after Road to Ruin) is a lot of fun.

Now, having said that, I have to add that I’m not really sure who the audience is for this stuff, or if there even is one.

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Musically, Road to Rock has all the attitude you’d expect from a band that bills itself as “the anti-Barney” and “the Wiggles’ worst nightmare,” and packs 20 songs into its brief 26-minute runtime, but lyrically, it’s mostly made up of nursery rhymes, which creates a bit of a riddle — how many kids are old enough to get excited about punk, but young enough to put up with even the most rockin’ version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”?

The answer, I’d wager, is “not many,” although the Boogers seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, and I’m not ashamed to admit I got a kick out of listening to Road to Rock. I’d suggest these songs for vintage t-shirt-wearing boys and girls between first and fourth grades — sort of a narrow demographic, I guess, but why look an anti-Barney in the mouth?

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Crank it up, teach your toddlers how to make devil horns with their adorable little fingers, and get ready for them to raid your collection of the real stuff in a few years.

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CD Review: John Carlin and the Kids Music Underground, “Welcome to the Kids Music Underground”

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John Carlin & the Kids Music Underground – Welcome to the Kids Music Underground (2009, Firehorse)
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Way back in the dark, grungy days of 1993, when every label was looking for the next Nirvana, I received a package from RCA containing the self-titled debut from a band called 700 Miles. The record didn’t do anything on the charts, and I was pretty vehemently anti-grunge, but 700 Miles still stuck with me — particularly the songs “Messages” and “Cherish This” — to the point that I was probably one of maybe two dozen journalists who called RCA’s publicity department to request the band’s second effort, Dirtbomb.

Now, 700 Miles wasn’t the best band in the world, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog, and later in the decade, I checked around to find out what happened to the band members after they went their separate ways. I knew frontman John Carlin moved on to a solo career, but for whatever reason, never got around to covering or purchasing his albums; all I knew of his work was the harrowing stuff he did with 700 Miles. So imagine my surprise a few years ago when I learned that Carlin had started a new career as a children’s musician — and the sort of children’s musician who wears brightly striped shirts and decks out his album artwork in Day-Glo colors.

If Welcome to the Kids Music Underground is musical carpetbagging, it doesn’t show in the songs; it might come clothed in some goofy packaging, but the contents are breezy, funny, and sensitive. Even better, the album has what might be the biggest age range I’ve heard in a kids’ record in some time — these 14 songs have something to appeal to young ones (“A Dinosaur Named Fred”), not-as-young ones (“Meet You at the Playground”), and even pre-teens (“Air Guitar”). Hell, “Jambalaya Road” has as much authentic New Orleans flavor as Huey Lewis and the News’ “Old Anetone’s,” a song I remember finding fairly funky at age 14. It resists pandering to its audience as successfully as any children’s album I can remember hearing, and the songs are terrifically catchy — not to mention short enough to fit young attention spans.

In the liner notes, Carlin says the group “journeyed far and wide, through our imagination and beyond; one stop was Brazil, where we discovered a different language of music” — but Underground isn’t exactly Rhythm of the Saints, if you know what I mean. Any world music influences have been blended pretty finely into Carlin’s own brand of well-written pop, which is nothing but a good thing. Purchase it for your brood now, and thank me later.