What goes in will come out. What we allow our children (and ourselves!) to watch, listen to and witness affect their thoughts, words and actions. As parents, we try to shelter our kids from the harsh music so ready to darken their minds and the provocative, worldly commercials on the TV. I’m so thankful for companies like Happy Kids Songs who develop songs just for kids that teach positive lessons with uplifting music. We were given three songs sets (15 songs total) to download and review: Friends & Sharing, Happiness & Attitude and Manners & Character. We also received a physical copy of the Happy Kids Songs Workbook: Hands on Activities to Build Character, Social and Emotional Skills.
The sets include the following songs:
1. Sailing on the Seven Cs
2. Everybody Wants to Find a Friend
3. Sharing Friends
4. Happy as Happy Can Be
5. Together
1. Shake it Out and Dance
2. Who Knows What’s a Kudo?
3. I Don’t Understand
4. Be Good to Yourself
5. Better Together
1. H-o-n-e-s-t-y
2. The Magic Word
3. Quirks
4. The Golden Rule
5. Six Little Kids
There are samples of all the songs on the website.
Custom-tailored to kids 3-8 years old, the songs are adult quality but kid oriented. The variety of adult and child soloists, children’s chorus, and wide range of instruments and styles of music easily hold children’s attention. Our favorite is probably Be Good to Yourself from the Happiness & Attitude set; it has a wonderful African feel to it that the kids really like. They like to get out daddy’s bongos and play along.
Divided in two sections, The Happy Kids Songs Workbook is 125 pages long and jam packed with hands-on activities, lyrics, color pages and more! In the first half, each of the 40 songs available from Happy Kids has its own lyric page and a child’s activity page to reinforce a key concept. The second half is a collection of activities for parents and teachers to do together with their children. Since the workbook can be adapted for kids 3-8, some activities are geared toward younger kids while others are more for older ones. The activities include arts and crafts, movement, drama and games. Some of the activities require additional materials, most of which can be found around the house.
The children I intended to use these songs and workbook with are ages 2 and 3, so the majority of the activities in the workbook were simply over their heads. They did enjoy listening to and dancing along with the fun music and coloring the pages in the workbook. Because the songs come in a downloadable format, you can burn them to a cd and take them on the go! Listening to them in the van or while cleaning up the toy room were prime times for us to listen and enjoy the songs. The copyright allows for reproduction of the workbook pages for use in family or school setting, so this would be great for coop use!! Character study is something most coops do at some point or another and this would be the perfect resource for that.
Prices
The Happy Kids Songs Workbook retails for $13.95.
Each of the albums are $4.95 to download all 5 songs, or you can download individual songs for $.99 each. As a bonus, when you purchase the albums, you get the lyric, coloring and activity pages for those songs to download for FREE!! My bottom line
These songs are fun, educational and entertaining, with age appropriate words and themes. They are great for down times like clean up or travel (again, I used them with 2 and 3 year olds). They would be perfect for kids ages 4-8 and fantastic for a homeschool coop group. The prices are right for each of the products, making them affordable for most any homeschool family. We enjoyed listening to and using these character building resources. Thank you Happy Kids for the opportunity!
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