Songs for Kids is a project that wants to find ways for children to be offered joyful, nature-loving, non-patriarchal, imaginative, and evocative music that encourages them to be kind, curious, adventurous, and loving. Music and song are one way children learn, express emotions, hear and tell stories, and get to know their bodies, yet the Arab world has very limited offerings of musical production for children.
Mophradat invited children’s writers Ahlam Bsharat, Hadil Ghoniem, and Yosra Sultan, along with musicians Aalam Wassif, Aya Metwali, Huda Asfour, Maurice Louca, Rehab Hazgui, and Sam Shalabi, to collaborate on producing an album of experimental and progressive songs for young children. The music is made for children around the ages of four to six, the moment where their acquisition and understanding of language as form and meaning starts to take shape. The process, which took the form of a series of online retreats, led to Affratta, an album of children’s music set to be released later this year.