Children Audio Books – An Old /New Concept
Children Audio Books
Children Audio Books – Today
It would be nice for every parent to sit and read stories to their children each and every day or whenever possible, and for many many children, the best experience ever is when their parents read them a story or book. Still nowadays parents are rarely if ever able to do it because they are either working during evening time, because they have poor eyesight, because they have no time or because they do not feel like doing it.
Children Audio Books as a tool
Children audio books fill the missing gap. They are an opportunity for children to listen to nice soothing voices narrating the stories, as well as for the parents who want to make their children be happy and benefit from the experience as well without them staying for a long time just narrating the story.
Children would almost always have their own preference as to the reading voice, so this should be kept in mind while purchasing audiobooks. Also, parents should always try to find a narrator whose voice is similar to theirs so that children feel comfortable listening to the books. If you go online to find audiobooks, you will always have the occasion to hear a sample of the voice before making a purchase.
Children Audio Books – For those that don’t like reading
Audiobooks are great for children, especially for those that have not yet learned how to read, they are also well adapted for older children that have a more difficult time reading. It’s good to keep a set of these audio books on CD in the car so that you can better focus on driving by keeping your children occupied and listening to a great story. Children audio books are especially great for long car trips. Many of the books you have enjoyed when you were a child or while growing up are available now as audio books, and this is a great way to make your child benefit from them as well.
Personalized Children Audio Books
Another good option for you if you have time is to record your own stories or audio books for your children whenever you have time. You can read the books and record your voice or you can record your own story from memory, and your children will like this personalized audio book you are gifting them.
Another issue to take into account, is that Children Audio Books may be a great resource, but only if you can make your children listen to them…
Allow me to relate to you here about a new method for my kids to have interest in Children Audio Books: It is not about fiction or non fiction audio books that you can read and play to your children. It’s not about kids story books that you can read, grab and play. It’s a revolutionary concept that I call “Creating Personalized Children Audio Books“, and it’s as easy as writing.
It all came up to my mind when lately, one of my kids was having problems listening at school, or obeying orders, and in one word was having behavioral issues both at school and at home. Usually, in these cases, all parents can do is repeat time and time again to their children how they should behave, maybe recur to punishment if the child doesn’t do as directed. But I acted differently. I wrote my own story about a kid named Michael in the same situation as my child, having the same problems and acting the same way, and then in the fictional story, I related how Michael’s behavior affected his life, his friends, his playing, and all things dear to him (the same things that are dear to my kid).
Then, I transformed the story I wrote in a “children audio books” mp3 format (not by reading it), but by using natural voices software, and I began playing it to my kid. The experience was amazing! Can you imagine a kid begging to listen to a Children Audio books story preaching him how to act or react before sleeping. This was very funny. Moreover, my kid began asking for a follow-up for the story.
So, in my opinion this is a new way of raising your kids, by giving them indirect advice and preaching through fictional Children audio books that they would love and ask to listen to.
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Children Audio Books – Great Fun for Kids
Children Audio Books Fun
Children Audio Books Fun
Children Audio Books in a Trip
Children’s audio books (also known as audiobooks) are great fun for kids, whether they are enjoying them at home or while traveling. If you are going on a summer vacation with your children, be sure and take some audio books with you; they’ll make the car, train, or plane trip much more fun for your children. There are also a lot of other benefits of listening to children audio books . You’ll find that audiobook editions of many popular books for kids are available. Below is a sampling of them: We tried to concentrate on specific audio books that are quite new in concept or style:
1. The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders
(one of the Children Audio Books that are not well known)
The audio book version of the Frogs Wore Red Suspenders reveals another of the talents of author Jack Prelutsky; he is also a musician. Your children won’t be able to resist the funny poems set to music and sung by Prelutsky, who also plays the guitar along with John Guth. The musical arrangements by Guth feature bass guitar, mandolin, percussion, and keyboards. I know from experience that 2 – to 4 -year -old children love to listen to this recording again and again.
2. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book 1): (One of the modern Children Audio Books)
Introduce your kids to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series with the audiobook version of the first book, The Lightning Thief. The series has proven to be enormously popular with middle school students, as well as upper elementary age kids. This fantasy series features an appealing middle school student, Percy Jackson, and the amazing revelations and adventures that change his life. Author Rick Riordan incorporates a lot of Greek mythology in the series, to great effect.
3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter Series, Book One): (A new kind of Children Audio books that looks like a classic)
Introduce your kids to the Harry Potter series (or begin rereading them all), starting with the audiobook version of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. With this fantasy novel by J. K. Rowlings, you’ll enjoy hours of mystery, suspense, wizardry, and fun. I’d recommend this for families with children eight years old and older.
4. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (A new kind of Children Audio Books that your kids will adore)
Everyone has a bad day, and the entire family will get a kick out of Alexander’s troubles in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. The audio book edition of the story is read by actress Blythe Danner. While I recommend it for four to eight year olds, it will appeal to parents also.
6. A Bear Called Paddington (A new concept of Children Audio Books)
The story of the little bear from darkest Peru who travels to England and finds himself on Paddington Station is a classic. The little bear is adopted by the Brown family who name him Paddington. Paddington gets into all kinds of amusing difficulties, and the Browns find their lives turned upside down. This children’s audio book is read by actor and comedian Stephen Fry, whose English accent and sympathetic reading make it a delight. I recommend it for ages 5-9.
Stay tuned for additional interesting Children Audio Books!
Creating Personalized Kids Audio Books
Kids Audio Books are a great resource, but… only if you can make your children listen to them…
I came across a new method for creating children interest for my kids in Audio Books, that I want to share with you: It is not about fiction or non fiction audio books that you can read and play to your children. It’s not about kids story books that you can read, grab and play. It’s a revolutionary concept that I call “Creating Personalized Kids Audio Books“, and it’s as easy as writing.
It all came up to my mind when lately, one of my kids was having problems listening at school, or obeying orders, and in one word was having behavioral issues both at school and at home. Usually, in these cases, all parents can do is repeat time and time again to their children how they should behave, maybe recur to punishment if the child doesn’t do as directed. But I acted differently. I wrote my own story about a kid named Michael in the same situation as my child, having the same problems and acting the same way, and then in the fictional story, I related how Michael’s behavior affected his life, his friends, his playing, and all things dear to him (the same things that are dear to my kid).
Then, I transformed the story I wrote in mp3 format (not by reading it), but by using natural voices software, and I began playing it to my kid. The experience was amazing! Can you imagine a kid begging to listen to a story preaching him how to act or react before sleeping. This was very funny. Moreover, my kid began asking for a follow-up for the story.
So, in my opinion this is a new way of raising your kids, by giving them indirect advice and preaching through fictional audio books that they would love and ask to listen to.
In case you need a demonstration of the above process, just write a short essay about a fictional story of a children having a behavioral pattern, send it to me, and I will process it and send it back to you in mp3 format so that you could try for yourself.
2 free kids story books and 1 free Children audio book
This week, I am offering the members of the Childrens Audio books website the following:
2 free kids story books (in pdf format):
- A story of stars (by Steven Doornbos)
A touching story of a 7-year old who visits his grandfather and learns the truth about the stars
- A story of stones (by Steven Doornbos)
Kyle is lost in the woods and discovers hidden meaning within stones he collects
1 free children audio book (in mp3 format):
- How to Tell Stories to Children (by Ellie Dixon)
Great resource for teachers/parents/supervisors. Secrets of successful storytelling plus wonderful stories to tell
If you wish to receive any of the above, please become a member of our website and send us an email.
This offer will be available till the end of next week. So hurry up. More offers for free children audio books are coming, so stay tuned.
Librivox – Great source of free childrens audio books
I came across a great source of Free Kids Audio Books on the Internet. Actually, I came across the site while looking for audio books, not childrens audio books specifically, but it looks their audio collection contains a lot of children titles.
Librivox.org (Notice the .org extension, because there are other sites but with different extensions)
The good thing about this site is that it is public domain, and it is maintained and fed by volunteers. Thus, if you feel you can contribute, do not hesitate, and meanwhile enjoy the great source of kids audio books it provides.
(Now on Technorati – token S6VK3ABHWPUH)
Free Kids Audio Books
Free Kids Audio Books abound on the Internet. You just have to make a search through google, and you will get around 50 million results. But does Free mean valuable and free? This is the question.
One of the perceptions of the Internet is that it gives Free Information, loads of Free Information, but this information is not necessarily valuable. The same applies to childrens audio books: From the millions of sites claiming to offer free kids audio books, you can find only tens of sites offering “really” free children story audio books, ZERO sites offering Free Educational children audio books, and ZERO sites offering Free Language Learning Children Audio Books.
If you look further at the sites offering free kids audio books, although these should be thanked for their effort and dedication, you can easily compare and discard a free Kids Audio Book from a non-free one. The difference is not only perceived, it’s staggering. From the accompanying sounds, to the tone of voice of the narrator, to the one versus many narrators style. However, as the saying goes “Enjoy anything that is free abundantly”, you can find free Kids Audio books at the following sites (Each week, I will be providing you with 2 sites offering Free Kids Audio Books), and if you have the chance to get your hand on a nice good quality audio book, please leave a comment below this article, this would be helpful for other readers.
- StoryNory
- LibriVox
As for the paid audio books, I am also including 2 resources that you may try: Your comments are most welcome!
- Learn Out Loud
- Audible
Kids Audio Books – What to choose?
Kids Audio Books used to play a major part in our entertainment as kids, and this wasn’t yesterday. Still at that time, we didn’t make a difference between a good sound children audio book, and a poor quality one. This is because our perception was different. Today however this is no longer the case.
Actually, when I was a kid, long before the CD was in place, we used to play audio books cassettes, over and over, till the cassettes could no longer play, or get trapped in the cassette players. The sound was acceptable, or so we thought.
At that time, we used to search for radio stations, and as soon as we got a perceivable signal, we were satisfied with the sound we received, although at times, it was noisy, with a lot of interference noises. Now with the advent of technology, this is no longer something we can bear or even think of. If you don’t understand what I mean, take an old favorite cassette of yours and play it (if you can put your hands on a cassette player), you will immediately notice that the cassette sound is no longer acceptable to you, even if you are not sound oriented. This is because you are now accustomed to a much better sound quality.
The same is true for audio books in general, and particularly kids audio books. Now, without having passed through the old technology as we did, children take technology as something acquired. If today I show my kids a cassette, they will ask me what it is, and if I play a cassette to them, they will beg me to stop it, not because they don’t want to listen to its content, but because its audio quality stops them from reaching for the content. It’s not an acceptable sound for them.
Now, what’s specific to kids audio books is that in addition to the sound quality of the recording, the narrating voice need to be:
- Acceptable from a kid point of view
- Entertaining
- If possible, close to one of the parents voice
You will come through many sites promoting kids audio books on the internet. Some offer good quality, some offer good price, some offer freebies. But while going through these, here are my recommendations to you:
- Always choose your sources with your kids in mind, knowing that they are demanding in terms of sound quality
- Always listen to your downloads or purchases before playing them to your kids
- Always listen to part of the recording before making a purchase
Finally, if you find good sources for kids audio books on the internet, please do not hesitate to share them.
Children Audio Books – What they can do for your kids
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.
Children Audio Books with parents voice!
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.
A great software that can generate loads of kids audio books instantly!
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
Cartoons v/s Kids Audio Books
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!