Toddlers Sing Storytime - CD - Various

Best Buy > Compact Disc

PriceZombie > Music

Toddlers, like most anybody, appreciate being put in touch with music that connects them to their peers, and that's precisely the point of , the third release in the Music for Little People label's series (following the debut and ). The CD culls classics like "Hot Cross Buns," "The Three Little Kittens," and "The Owl and the Pussycat," but dry recitations don't cut it here. The approach, rather, is to let a handful of frothy toddlers run with this stuff, often to hilarious effect. "Yolking," for instance, about Humpty Dumpty's famed fall cracks the kids up, and instead of passively pondering the location of the wayward pup in "Oh Where, Oh Where (Has My Little Dog Gone)," they take a breather toward song's end to set up a silly search party. Along the same lines, the little girl who breaks into "Baa Baa Black Sheep" confounds her fellow singing toddlers by intimating, adorably, that the sheep in question may in fact be pink, and the Muffin Man, always sort of a mysterious figure, finally gets a formal introduction by the young fellow who tackles his namesake tune. Each performer defies expectations on these ditties, but the English-accented tot who takes on "The Grand Old Duke of York" deserves special mention for his determined tone, as does the sweet-voiced singer of "Bow Bow (On My Violin)." Otherwise, the kids' off-the-cuff banter, sublime in its silliness, is this record's main selling point; it's bound to make 2- to 4-year-olds feel like flies on the wall at a play group for particularly precocious, fun-loving friends.