We are teaching our son what all the animals say. We don't know why. This might have been useful in an agrarian society, but nowadays, we don’t run into a lot of cows and ducks and horses and pigs, E-I-E-I-O. (What’s with the E-I-E-I-O? Does anybody get that part?)
Anyway, it’s often easier for a child to learn the animal sounds than the names of the animals, and we love getting a response, and they love the game, and it’s in all these books, so it’s what we teach.
But a couple of animals don’t make any sounds, or at least not that I know of.
What do you do when your child asks you a question and you don’t know the answer? Really? You tell him the truth? Hunh. Well, we make up something that will entertain us.
We told Elvis that a giraffe sounds kind of like Beaker from the Muppets: “MimiMEEmimi!”
The turtle puts both fists in the air and proclaims… “TURTLE!”
I consider this harmless misinformation for my own entertainment, but I will probably feel bad years from now when one of the boys gets in a fight because some guy in a bar argues the point of what a giraffe says.