Fisher Price Alligator Xylophone Toy

My son received this as a present for his first Christmas. He was 7 months old at the time and he absolutely loved it. He's now 11 months old and still chooses to play with it on a daily basis. He prefers the mallet and xylophone to the keys, and it has really helped with his hand-eye coordination. I would definitely recommend this toy!

I can confirm that's the scale is arranged in the opposite order it would be on a piano. But the toy is targeted for a very young audience. And I think the musicality of the toy is an added bonus to the learned hand-eye coordination. I think children will be done playing with this long before you start them in on piano lessons.

Only one word of warning: when he first received the toy, he would shove the end of the mallet in his mouth. I recommend keeping an eye on very young infants to make sure they don't gag themselves with the mallet. Had I known he would do that, I would have left it zip-tied to the bottom of the toy until he was old enough to use it.

I originally purchased this item as a last minute Christmas gift for my son, who was about 2 3 years old at the time. It's a very durable toy, and it has a cute alligator face with a hinged mouth for holding the xylophone stick. However, as a xylophone it is a rather sub standard toy. When I was a child, the typical toy xylophone was an 8 keyed diatonic scale model (doe, ray, mi, fa, so, la, ti, doe) that was ideal for playing simple children's songs. At the time that I purchased this item, my son was starting to discover the joy of musical toys, so I thought that a xylophone would be fun for him. Unfortunately, this Fisher Price product was the only xylophone available at the chain store where I did my 11th hour Christmas shopping that year. (The moral of the story is don't wait until the last minute to do your holiday shopping!) The alligator xylophone only has six keys and, for all intents and purposes, it is out of tune. At first I thought that maybe it was just the specific one that I picked up that was out of tune. However, after testing two other alligator xylophones on the shelf, I realized that Fisher Price had made them this way. Basically it is nothing more than an off-scale noisemaker. This was very disappointing... Unfortunately, my impulsive side got the better of me and I purchased it anyway. In retrospect, I have a hard time understanding exactly why the manufacturer chose not to have a normal scale for a musical toy it just doesn't make sense. In the end, my son played with this toy sporadically for about 2 or 3 months before abandoning it.

I hate to say it, but I think that our dust-collecting alligator is going to find its way to a thrift store very soon...

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This xylophone only has 6 keys. If it had 8 for a full octave, you could play full songs. There are very few songs that use only 6 keys!

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This is a cute toy and sounds pretty decent. One of the notes is slightly flat on mine, but I guess I shouldn't expect it to be note-perfect.

I don't appreciate that the keys are in reverse order compared to a piano. My 9-month-old is too young to use them she just bashes the thing randomly but by the time she's old enough to use them (as opposed to just hitting the xylophone with the mallet), she'll be old enough that it's important to learn the keys in the right order assuming she has any musical inclination. Oh well.

The mallet is a bit long and unwieldy, and its preferred use by my child is as a teether.

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This toy has placed the colored bars in the wrong order from left to right, having the low side on the right and the high side on the left. This will teach children the wrong association of high and low, since on the piano the low side is on the left and the high side is on the right. I strongly do not recommend this product as a parent and a piano teacher.