Teaching Your Children To Sing --Some Resources for Christian Families

I am so fortunate to have been born to parents with great (and ecclectic) musical tastes, and to have spent so much of my childhood in church communities where beautiful singing was highly valued and taught.

As we are no longer in a community where the beautiful old hymns, or even basic harmony, are taught from a young age, it's become very important to me to pass along good musical skills and taste to our children. In the abscence of a piano, I'm having to rely on our few hymnbooks and my own voice, and also some tapes and CD's. We've found a few really great sing-along series, which both boys love, and I thought I'd share them.

First, if you can get your hands on the original "Psalty" series (the great big, blue, singing songbook!), you can teach your children a whole bunch of great songs, some of them praise songs, others pulled directly from Scripture. I listened to Psalty and loved him when I was a tot, and now I get all choked up hearing my little boys singing along to those beautiful old songs. (Psalty's Praise Party, and Psalty's Praise Party 2 are some of our favorites, though they're hard to find)

The Wee Sing series Wee Worship is also great. Someone gave us a three-cd set with Favorite Songs of the Bible, Favorite Sunday School Songs, and Favorite Hymns of Praise, which comes to about 45 easy to sing kid's songs.

Finally we have four of the many sing-along CD's from Twin Sister's Productions (click link to see the details on one!)--Scripture Songs, Bible Songs, Hymns, and Rejoice. The one in our CD player most often is Scripture Songs, as it uses word-for-word scripture verses, for easy memorization (including John 3:16 of course, but also Psalm 107:1, Phillipians 4:4, the books of the Bible song, and more).

Although it's not part of a series, I've found Rebecca Pearl's From the Ends of the Earth

to be a very lovely CD to have around.

We also like reggae, but you may or may not want your children lowering their voices a few octaves to sing "Fiyah burn, fiyah burn.....why you wanna shoot ya bruh-dah doooowwwn?", so I won't recommend anything in that genre. Oh, why not??--there is a Christian reggae band called Christafari that does not espouse some of the less desireable cultural things that go along with reggae (actually, they so actively oppose the use of "ganja" and Rasta theology/reasoning that they've faced threats of violence at some concerts!), and you can find other Christian artists who perfom reggae, dancehall, and roots music at their website and online store. They do have a Reggae Sunday School CD that looks interesting.