Children's Audio Books

Children Audio books are today the number 1 learning coupled with entertainment tool for children. This is why:

- They are easy to digest
- They are easy to start / stop / play to accommodate children different learning and listening skills
- They teach children a very important skill which is to listen and assimilate
- They are a learning tool, although children do not feel it
- They offer the largest variety of themes, fiction stories, so that you cannot think of a book today that hasn’t it’s audible version
- They offer sometimes abridged versions of the original audio book

So, if you haven’t already gotten in the habit of making your children listen to audio books, now is the time to do so. From 4 years and up, children cannot but get captivated by kids audio books, and by getting them to have this need, you cannot imagine the benefit you would be doing them.

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Many times, parents are confronted to particular children behaviors, like denial in front of evidence, violent behavior, nightmares at night, etc. These behaviors are most of the time impossible to interpret or address, even for professionals in the field of education and psychology. They leave parents busted, not knowing what to do or how to act.

Fortunately, there are many parents audio books available to address this matter. Below, we will address an interesting title that we came across: It’s called Crash Course on Successful Parenting: 13 Dynamics of Raising Great Kids

Here’s the abstract of the book:

Successful Parenting is an excellent primer on the most important characteristics of parents who raise healthy and happy children. Beginning with the biggest fears that parents report, the books deals with dynamics of what it takes to understand your child at the various ages of life, the 4 things all children need no matter what their age, the gift of consistency, the commitment of time, the blessing of spiritual nurture, establishing traditions, healthy boundaries at the various ages, dealing with difficulties, educational choices, teaching life skills that lead toward independence and more!

You can read more about this book here:

If you happen to listen to this parents audio book, please do not hesitate to post your review below.

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Lately, I have come across a website that is promoting a method for parents to read and record audio books for their own children. The concept is nice, even though in my opinion, it would be much richer and entertaining if these kids audio books recorded by some parents can be made available and shared with others. Maybe, contributing parents can have free access to titles, and others would have to pay some small charge for downloading the children audio books.

Anyhow, the concept as it is is interesting for the following reasons, as stated in their website:

- The recorded kids story book sound is very professional, with great music and sound effects that kids will love.

- The system as it is designed show the parent when to speak and which line to read. When you are happy it is sounding just right, it produces a high-quality MP3 with all the music and sound effects for a listening experience that is fun and worthwhile.

- There is a a wonderful choice of titles to suit everybody’s choice. From The Snail and the Whale and Laura’s Star, to Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, with new titles being added all the time!

- There is a free trial for every one.

The website address is the following Childrens Audio Books with parents voice. If you happen to try it, please share your experience with us, and if you care, share your children audio book, and we will make it available here for download by others, and we will form eventually an Audio Book Club.

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Long ago, I used to have a software to convert text to audio. Its name was ReadAloud and it was open source.

I don’t know if anyone has tried this software (that still exists by the way), but it used to be quite painful to listen to the robot voice reading the text. You could barely listen to the voice more than 2 minutes, and you had to be extremely concentrated to be able to understand what was read.

Last week, while wondering if there had been any advance in that kind of software, I did some research, and I came across a lot of titles that pretend to read text. I did download all those I could find on the first two pages of google, and I can say that there has been a lot of advance in the text reading voices software field.

Now, instead of the robotic voice, the software titles come with many natural sounding voice options. The reading can be boring if the material we listen to is very long, but for a short kid story book or for classical children audio books, the result could be acceptable.

Below, I am including the link for one particular software that caught my attention because of the many options it has. For instance:

- It can convert any text including pdf and web pages to an audio format (mp3)
- It has many voice options, including american english, british english, french, spanish and german among other languages
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) comes with 1000 free ebooks
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) allows the creation of audio books with background music, echo, etc. which is great

This kind of software could be a great resource for parents looking:

- To easily and freely create children audio books for their kids of numerous kinds

- Improve their kids language skills

Please try it and give me your opinion.

Read Aloud

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Most children love cartoons (Adults too as a matter of fact), but what benefit do they take from cartoons?

Sure, cartoons are entertaining, and they can also develop a child’s imagination, but how do that compare to the advantages of audio books:

- When the child can see no image in front of him or her, his or her imagination is stimulated much more than if he or she can see an image

- When the child has no picture in front of him or her, he or she gets himself to concentrate, thus developing his or her concentration skills

- When the child can only rely on his or her hearing to understand what is going on in the story, he or she gets better at listening comprehension

These are only some of the advantages your child gets by listening to audio books of all sorts, whether they are kids story books, or christian audio books, or any children audio book for that matter, so it should be our duty as parents to encourage them from their young age to listen to audio books, and to allow them to get into that habit, and to make them derive pleasure from that habit, we need to select the good audio books, not just anyone that we can find around.

As stated in a previous post, I am conducting a study about the various kinds of childrens audio books that we can find on the web, and I will be posting the study results shortly. Stay tuned!

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Generally, people are attracted by what is offered free of charge. While that behavior is only normal and makes one feel good, and feel like one has hit a jackpot, not everything that is given free of charge has value.

In the past two days, I have browsed the internet extensively in search of free childrens audio books, I have come across some of interest to which I will be linking in a separate section shortly. I have also come across many small kids audio books that are also of value, not because of the story or the way it is told, but because they are accompanied by a text that can be printed, and that can offer good value for someone learning a language. I will also be posting links about these shortly.

These free resources of value represent about 10% of all the free resources on the internet concerning kids story books, most of which are of little use from a parents and from a child point of view. Unfortunately, the best resources available in the form of audio books are paid ones, but it’s like everything in life, nothing is really free.

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In the hectic times we live or that we put ourselves into, and because we are busy all the time doing things for our work, for our home, for our family, and for our kids, we usually do not have enough time to develop ourselves spiritually. Throughout our life, we can become very rich financially, we can amass a large amount of friends and acquaintances, we can even reach to a point where we are at our best personally, but what it is of our spiritual development.

On Sundays, many times, we look for all kinds of excuses not to go to church. At times even we go, we are busy thinking about what will come next during our day, we get easily distracted by the voice of the priest, or what this and that person is wearing. This is especially true on occasions when we go to the church to witness the marriage of a friend or close person. In summary, we reach times where we are completely away from our christian and parish life, and by the same token from our christian values.

This emptiness in our spiritual life is not compensated for elsewhere. We barely read the bible, we rarely meditate, and on top of all that, our children follow our mediocre spiritual life, unconsciously by following our example. We later wonder why so many kids turn into delinquents nowadays, and we even tend to push away the thought that this may happen to our kids. In one sentence, we mask our eyes, and we make ourselves believe that things do not exist because we are not seeing them, while we have our eyes masked in the first place.

What if we can turn all this round in an easy way, not cumbersome, and rather easy to follow? What if we get ourselves to listen to christian audio books for a fixed number of minutes each day? What if we make it a habit not only to listen to christian audio books ourselves, but rather to play them or to play the bible for 5 or 10 minutes each day in family, and later meditate together about what we have just listened to? Would not that be an enriching experience both for ourselves and for our kids? Would not that put back on the right track to spirituality and self-fulfillment?

Today, we have incredible means to develop ourselves spiritually, in a fun and easy way, while involving all the family, and benefiting immensely from the experience. This can be done through the tens of christian audio book titles that we can find pretty everywhere, so we really have no excuse to remain on a dead road spiritually.

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A new study shows that Kids audio books are mostly sold online (60%), then through music stores (30%) and the remaining percentage through libraries and department stores. This is quite amazing, knowing that some years ago, the higher percentage was that of libraries, and this means that libraries either lost a huge share of the audio books market, particulary the children audio books market, or that they never gave that market a real importance in the first place.

The latter is most obviously the reason of the new repartition. Go to a library and ask for their range of kids audio books, they will take you maybe to a small corner where they can show you tens of titles, of the thousands of titles available online. Besides, knowing that audiobooks do not have the feel of the normal books, there is no emotion when at a library store, one takes an audio CD in his or her hands, and as a matter of fact, he or she can get a lot more information about the title while online.

According to the same study, the top 10 kids story books sold online in the form of audio books are the following (not in order):

- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
- Harry Potter Complete Series
- Cinderella
- Brown Bear and friends
- Animal Tales
- Peter Pan
- Alice in Wonderland
- The City under the back steps
- Winnie the Pooh
- The Golden Compass

It can be noticed from the list above that 5 out of the top 10 audio books are classical children audio books, which confirms the fact that kids story books are never out dated.

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Classical Children Audio Books are audio books about classical stories that each and every person knows. These stories are so well anchored in our brain that we don’t even remember the first time we heard them, and as soon as we have kids in age to hear stories, we don’t miss telling them these stories.

These classical stories are universal, and the strange thing is that they are known in all world cultures and in all countries. Wherever you go, if you relate something about Snow White or Cinderella, you are sure the person you’re talking to knows what you’re talking about, and this is quite amazing because very little things are so well known around the globe.

Even though the story itself is classical, there are usually various versions about the stories, relating somehow the same facts either in a different way or with various twists, and this is where the different cultures give their twist to the story. All in all, this is enriching in itself. You shouldn’t find It strange if Snow White is depicted as a black princess and Cinderella as Chinese. Robin Hood could become an arab thief, and Aladdin a boy from Spanish descent, etc.

The different versions of the classical children stories make them original and fun, and they can play a role in the creativity skill development for kids, especially if they are told to the children in the form of kids audio books.

I’ve come recently upon a new version of The princess and the frog where all the characters are from African descent, the princess is not a real princess until she marries the prince, and the real princess kiss has no effect on the frog. Amazing the twist made to the story.

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Children’s knowledge of a language is dictated by the amount of practice they have of that language.  By practice, it’s meant reading, writing, but also talking and listening.  By far, the easiest of these is the listening thing, and it concerns mainly listening to audio books in other languages.

Childrens audio books narrated in other languages are not only entertaining, but very useful to the language skills of the kids.  At first, listening and understanding every word may be difficult, but very rapidly, kids will get into the habit of understanding much faster than an adult does, because a children is accustomed to listening at times without understanding and without getting frustrated, while an adult usually gets angry if he doesn’t understand one word.

Students around the world are now learning languages through audio books.  These are one of the most effective way of learning the language from A to Z.  Children’s audio books thus:

-       broaden kids vocabulary

-       put them on the track to understand rapid speaking in languages that are not the child’s native

-       Make them learn the correct pronunciation from native language speakers

Learning a language by means of an audio book is straight forward.  All you need to do for your children is get them audio books on CD, tape or MP3 format through direct download, there are even loads of free audio books on the net.

However, for your first experience, it is recommended to do some research to find the audio book that best suits your kids needs, and to get an audio book with more than one speaker because these are more expressive and more interesting.

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