Kaitlyn got her own personalized CD from Name Your Tune, and she loves it! As soon as I start the van, she starts pointing to the CD player saying “on! On, Mama, on!”. I’m hoping that if she hears her name sung in songs, she will catch on that it is her name, since she now will only refer to herself as “baby”. Ask her what her name is. She pats her chest and says “baby”.

I was impressed with the song quality on the CD. Each CD is sung individually, it’s not just digitally inserting the names into prerecorded songs. The only song on the CD I didn’t recognize is one called “Down By The Park”, but all the rest were familiar. This is a list of the songs you get on the CD:

1. Hello, How Are You?
2. If You’re Happy And You Know It
3. Old MacDonald
4. Oh How I Want to Go
5. Wheels on the Bus
6. Boom Boom, Ain’t It Great To Be YOU!
7. Down By The Park
8. The More We Get Together
9. Head and Shoulders
10. There are Seven Days
11. Rainbow Song
12. ABC Medley
13. I Don’t Want To Live On The Moon
14. Instrumental Lullaby

Kaitlyn loves the ABC Medley, which has all the songs with that same tune-the ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Baa Baa Black Sheep. I like how the ABCs ends with “Kaitlyn knows her ABCs, next time sing along with me.”

Another interesting thing about the Name Your Tune is their commitment to philanthrophy and to not harming the environment. A portion of CD sales is donated to Hear Here, which helps provide hearing aids to hearing impaired children. In addition, founder Candace Alper has made a commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of this CD. From a press release on the website:

Inspired by a desire to make the world a cleaner place for her daughter and other
children, Name Your Tune creator and executive producer, Candace Alper, has taken steps big and small to reduce her company’s environmental footprint. She worked with Zerofootprint, a not-for-profit environmental organization that helps individuals, homes and businesses reduce their effects on the environment, to help offset her own carbon emissions.

Alper pays a monthly fee to Zerofootprint to virtually eliminate the environmental effects of Name Your Tune’s shipping practices. In return, she received stickers to place on all of her
packages, ensuring customers that the shipments have created no footprint. And her offsetting fee goes to help plant trees in British Columbia. “The idea of offsetting is to counterbalance
the environmental effects of your actions to ensure a healthier environment,” Alper says.
Name Your Tune also changed its CD cases. Once encased in a plastic jewel case, Name Your Tune CDs are now housed in a cardboard digipak, using paper that was approved by the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), an international organization promoting responsible management of the world’s forests. The new packs, which are made from recyclable resources, vegetable-based ink and water-based coating, are safe for kids and the planet.

Name Your Tune also changed its shipping packaging. Operating primarily online, the
company ships its made-to-order CDs along with other personalized items around the
globe. They now use recycled and recyclable shipping envelopes instead of bubble wrap,
which were not recyclable and contributed a substantial amount to landfills. “We are
very pleased that we have been able to provide packaging that will end up in the blue bin
instead of the trash can,” Alper says.

Name Your Tune also became the first online retailer to join the “Plastic Ain’t My Bag” campaign. Paul Edney, Director of We Are What We Do, a movement to inspire people to change the world through their daily actions, said, “It’s fantastic to have a retailer who uses very few plastic bags promoting the campaign. There is a bigger message here about societies ‘throw away’ attitude that Candace Alper at Name Your Tune really ‘got’.”

In addition to personalized CDs, the Name Your Tune website also sells other personalized products like wooden stools and coatracks, wall art, blankets, and books. And at $20 each, the CDs are an affordable and fun gift idea for the holidays!

Tags: Children's literature

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Preschoolers, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.