Archive for the ‘Christian Audio Books’ Category
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!
Children Christian Audio Books
Children Christian Audio Books are today one of the most important sources to teach kids about Christian values and the history of Christianity. Why?
- Because nowadays, children don’t like preaching
- Because priests and religion men are getting further and further from children and families
- Because children love stories and chistian audio books are told in the same way a story is told
Furthermore, kids tend to learn the stories they love by heart, and this has become a certainty with the advent of childrens audiobooks, especially that these can be played over and over, in the car, on mp3 players, at sleep time, etc.
So today is the good time to convert your children to chicken soup christian stories, instead of violent mangas and useless stories that are played all the time on TV and radio stations. This way, you are sure to put your loved kids on the right track, and with the large choice of suitable christian audiobooks available in the libraries and online, parents have no excuse today not to let their children indulge in the life beneficious christian audio books, and this is not only directed to christian parents, because christian audio books can suit all children from all religions.
I think I need an easy set up audiobook system for my children sleep time
Yesterday, my kids asked me to read them a story before sleep. Usually my wife takes care of that. To convince me, my oldest kid said “a small small story”. So I said to myself ”Let’s try it, this will take max 10 minutes”. I got up to choose a book, and they began asking for this and this and this story. No wonder, they know them all for having heard them more than one time, which reinforced my feeling that I needed to set up an easy system for playing childrens audio books at their room.
Since I didn’t know the story they chose, I couldn’t tell it by heart, so I began reading it page after page, line after line, like a machine… It was so boring!!! Not the story. The fact of reading it… Each time I was turning the page, I was trying to guess how many pages I still had to go through. At the same time, even though I was tring to sound interested by the kids audiobook, I was feeling my kids getting away with their thoughts, because of my monotonous tone. My wife who heard me reading told me later my voice was so boring that she wondered how the children were still awake by the end of the story.
What a relief it was when the story ended, maybe ten minutes later, but ten minutes that looked like an eternity for me, and maybe for the children as well. So, today, I have made up my mind. I will install a portable system in the kids room to play audiobooks at sleep time, and I will select a given set of chidren stories for them, and also a set of christian audio books to inspire them, some paragraphs from the bible, some relaxing music too.
I will tell you later how the experience will turn out!