V is for Veggie Tales: Library Notes

Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki are Americans who created a computer animated Christian series whose main characters are vegetables!  It is a great concept to help children have a positive experience with vegetables in the hopes that perhaps it rubs off on the practice of eating them too!

What I love about the series, apart from the Christian content, is that it is filled with fun songs and stories that engage the children and create moments for interacting with your child on positive topics that are interesting to both of you! The benefit of having catchy tunes is that children love to repeat them, over and over. One advantage of this is that they learn the new vocabulary and memorize the text quicker. This will help them build their fluency of speech and help with the pronunciation of a wide variety of words too. It also provides more opportunities to sing along with them.

My boys liked "Oh, Where is my hairbrush?" and it led to a number of funny interactions. If I wanted their hair brushed, it gave me a silly way to bring up the topic that was low-key and made it less of a battle but more of a game that they would enjoy. I could add to it by varying the song to match other things we were looking for such as O where is my banana? or my keys or my silver top? and so forth. After all, search and find is a popular game that most children like to participate in. Being the first to find something is a thrill and keeps children engaged in the song and making attempts to find something more. That is one adaptation idea.

Veggie Tales is a trademark collection that includes a number of books, songs and videos that you can read with your child(ren). The series began in 1993 with "Where is God when I'm S-Scared?" For a time they reduced Bible specific content to reach a wider audience with good principled messages. In 2019 Vischer and Narwocki teamed up again for a revival of the series. I think there is a title for nearly every topic of interest. Counting, Alphabet, Colours, Principles, Bible stories, seasonal holidays and more are a part of the series. There is a four-part board book collection on Values that is suitable to feature for the letter V. The values are good manners, helping others, listening and sharing. 

However, today I chose another V selection in the series, Veggie Tales: How Many Veggies?! After all, we want to maximize the focus on vegetables as part of our focus on this letter of the alphabet since this also means encouraging children with good role models to enjoy about healthy food choices. However, the book is really just about counting the ten vegetables as they board a boat with an unfortunate outcome! Children will likely enjoy it. The vocabulary is simple with a great rhyming pattern and it includes counting which is appealing to young children practicing this skill. However, there is no message that attracts me to this particular book so perhaps I would turn to a Bible story or values based book instead. Or, we could look onward to W and their story of Josh and the Big Wall (Jericho) or stay with V and view a Video on Veggietales Vikings! The vikings video is pro-sharing and anti-bullying. The title is Lyle, the Kindly Viking. I watched a video with the theme song and I still crack up at their lyrics. However, I did not see a book version when I looked.  No complaints though. 

There are multiple V words related in this blog and while the ideas may be limited, there is a solid introduction to a variety of VeggieTales videos and books that will hopefully inspire you to visit this vast collection with something for your voracious consumer of vegetables and  value-based works!