An all-new edition in the excellent Baby Einstein series, Baby Van Gogh is a wonderful developmental video designed for infants, babies, and toddlers. This time around, focus is on the brilliant world of color. And what better classic artist to feature in a video all about colors than Vincent Van Gogh? Known to have been a brilliant colorist, Van Gogh's use of pure, bright color can be appreciated by even the youngest viewers.
With a combination of art, music, video, and poetry, The Baby Einstein company has produced a fantastic video and book set. With Vincent Van "Goat" as the puppet guide, young children are exposed to stimulating sights and sounds. The program is divided into 6 vignettes, each devoted to a particular color and featuring a playful rendition of a Van Gogh masterpiece (including such delights as "The Starry Night" and "Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase").
This engaging video presents a parade of colorful strawberries, flowers, hot air balloons, flamingoes and more. Striking scenes from nature, colorful and exciting toys, as well as real children capture the attention of young viewers.
Each vignette presents the featured color in word-form creatively appearing on the screen. A pleasing succession of natural scenes and trademark moving toys follows, as well as a sequence in which Vincent Van Goat paints his own version of a Van Gogh masterpiece with a special focus on that color. A poem is clearly recited with an emphasis on the feelings and moods that are commonly associated with individual colors. Accompanying music and poems help define the segment and clearly express the colorful "feelings". Interludes are playful and do an excellent job of breaking up the segments and keeping a young child's attention. We love the fact that each sequence is relatively short and strung together in such a way that different styles are mixed — that is, a word may be followed by a demonstration of a toy, a graphic animation, then a nature scene. This keeps young children (whose attention spans haven't fully developed) engaged and stimulated.
As with previous videos released by this company, the musical component of Baby Van Gogh features re-engineered classical music by major composers like Strauss, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. Played on toys, the music is playful and designed to bring out the creative and artistic side of any young child. Zany sound effects and clear narration from the creator Julie Aigner-Clarke herself help round out the audio component of this video.
The book that accompanies this video features beautiful photography and illustrations, as well as expressive poems by Clarke. It follows the video sequentially, and parents will enjoy sharing it with their children. Though a board book may have been more practical for this age group, the book nonetheless provides an excellent extension activity that not only helps reinforce concepts learned in the video, but also serves as a gentle reminder to parents that the best kind of learning is multisensory and interactive.
The addition of written words that are then spoken and illustrated through an animation is wonderful — while one cannot expect that young children will learn to "read" these words, this video can help impress upon children that written words are not just scribbles, but rather they have real meaning and can be associated with objects, actions, people, and so forth.
Many parents will enjoy the fact that the objects chosen for the video are real — in my own experience, some of my favorite "baby books" were actually photography manuals. Infants and toddlers, although attracted to some animations, seem to respond to real objects more readily and spiritedly.
The intent is to use the video as a "video board book". At least for the first few viewings, parents can sit their toddlers on their laps and point out objects as they would when showing them a board book. Younger toddlers are not expected to sit and watch the whole video in one sitting.
