Education: Tips for Tots

We like the food that Mommy bakes,

The meat and vegetables that she makes;

We don’t eat fast, we don’t eat slow,

We eat the food that makes us grow. . . .

We try to make our manners good,

Just like our Mommy says we should.*

This ungrammatical little number, from an album of records for tots from three to six, is the handiwork of young Murray and Sylvia Winant. The two New Yorkers, who have no children of their own, got the idea for It’s Fun to Eat from watching their neighbors’ struggles. On one side of each record, a boisterous breakfast, lunch or supper character — Doc Clock, Happity-Yappity Appetite and Sip-Sip Supper —coaxes the kiddies into putting away their toys and washing their hands. The other side hustles them into eating up every thing on their plates. It is all done to rollicking music.

Learning-by-hearing is the serious side of a new fad for children’s recordings, most of which aim only to entertain (see Music). Sales indicate that a lot of desperate parents need help.

The Winants’ West Coast counterpart is Graphic Educational Productions, alias Jerome Goldberg of Los Angeles. Graphic’s more ambitious series is for children from five to nine — who spend most of their time asking “Why, Daddy?” The records will give the right answer to 25 perennial posers such as “Why are bees so busy?” “Why do I have to go to sleep?” Goldberg’s formula: mixing solid fact, harmless fiction and sound effects. Sample (from Graphic’s What Makes Rain?):

“From the west there drifted a small, white cloud, moving high above the earth. In that cloud were millions of tiny drops of water that had been drawn up from the earth by the heat of the sun. . . . The first raindrop looked down on the tired earth and asked, ‘Now, may we go?’ And each time the cloud would say, ‘Not yet, my little travelers. . . .'”

Graphic, which has sold 60,000 albums almost overnight, was last week working on the $64 question: “Where do babies come from?”

* Copyright, 1946, Winant Productions, Inc.