Back in the ’90s, offbeat indie-rock heroes They Might Be Giants put a series of mini-songs called “Fingertips” on their album Apollo 18. Many of them were little more than a single phrase, adorned with a musical treatment that was just strange enough to lodge them permanently in your head. They’ve applied a bit of that technique to their two recent addictive kids’ records, Here Come the 123s and Here Come the ABCs; the musical versions of these were mentioned here a while back, but recent versions pack each CD with a must-have bonus — a DVD in which the little learning tunes are accompanied by animated films and introduced by adorable sock-puppet versions of the bandmates John and John. Elsewhere in the DVD aisle are three more restrained pleasures for youngsters, short movies from the ’50s and ’60s that have become such classic fables that one recently inspired a critically praised feature-length remake. Each centers on one object of a child’s devotion: The Red Balloon (the one that was remade) is self-explanatory; White Mane is about a beautiful horse; and Paddle to the Sea is about a little canoe and rider, carved out of wood, who make their way from the Canadian mountains to the ocean, encountering everything from frogs to wildfire along the way. Kids who haven’t had enough of the alphabet after They Might Be Giants’ version should pick up The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!, another curious celebrity effort. Here, comedian Steve Martin pens memorable alliterative rhymes for each letter, while New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast does illustrations for each. Book-lovers on the other side of the preschool/high school continuum, meanwhile — and maybe their parents — should hunt down The Film Club, the nonfiction account of what happened when a novelist made an unusual deal with his teenaged son. He would let the boy drop out of school, which he hated, on one condition: He had to watch three movies a week, ones Dad chose, and be available to discuss them afterward.