Hazel Butler - Heaven's Humpties: Nursery Rhymes For God's Family
STYLE: Childrens RATING OUR PRODUCT CODE: 45790-14148 LABEL: Independent FORMAT: CD Album ITEMS: 2
Reviewed by Niall Dunne
As someone who grew up listening to Ishmael, and found God from a young age through his songs, I am supportive of people producing such materials to enrich children's lives and make God accessible to them. However, 'Heaven's Humpties' doesn't quite cover the same ground. It is an interesting idea - take famous nursery rhymes and rewrite them with a Christian message. But it is hard to know what age the album is pitched at. It comes as a double CD package. CD 1 is a collection of nursery rhymes read aloud and CD 2 has 23 musical versions of some of the rhymes. If it's aimed at slightly older children, then I think the spoken versions of the rhymes are presented in a fairly dull fashion. The musical versions may be more interesting, but they are quite traditional sounding, which again renders them quite inaccessible for older children. If it's aimed at younger children I think the language is too complicated to understand. Hopefully I am wrong and children are getting a lot out of 'Heaven's Humpties', because as I say, these kind of resources are greatly needed. Having some experience in this area myself, I would say more effort thinking about how to present this idea would be worth a lot here.
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