Ella Jenkins: Early Early Childhood Songs - Ella Jenkins

These songs are friendly-sounding enough for even babies to enjoy.

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Common Sense rates it
5
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Music details
  • Artist(s): Ella Jenkins
  • Genre: Children's Music
  • Label: Smithsonian Folkways
  • Parental Advisory: No
  • Edited Version: No
  • Release Date: 08/20/1996

Parents need to know

For a collection of nursery rhymes, this is quiet and unobtrusive. Plus, Jenkins's multicultural approach always ensures that even the adults can learn something new.

Singing traditional nursery rhymes is very often the first step in a child's musical education. These simple little ditties teach and reinforce the skills of singing on key, imitating rhythms, and memorizing words.

Jenkins even enriches the experience by creating name-that-tune type games for the second half of the CD, in which she plays a bit of the tune on an instrument, then sings. As another added bonus, in line with JenkinsÙ³ aim to educate culturally as well as musically, the tune "London Bridge" is fitted with Japanese words.

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Common Sense says

What's the story?

Reviewed by Shana Kirk

Over the past four decades, Ella Jenkins has made herself legendary among music educators by recording her own preschool music classes. This album, originally issued in 1982, is a very informal musical game session with a class of three- and four-year-olds.

The first half of the disc is completely instrumental, meant as a purely listening session, but could also serve as karaoke-style backup music for sing-alongs. In the second half, Jenkins begins a tune-guessing game by playing a few bars of the melody for the kids to guess before they start singing the words. Always careful to keep the children involved, she sometimes gives away the more difficult lyrics a few beats early and also directs some simple movements to accompany the songs (great for antsy back-seaters).

Other notable highlights include funny clucking noises in "Pop Goes the Weasel" and some stellar kazoo playing in "This Old Man."

Is it any good?

5
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