Archive for the ‘Kids 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!
Top 10 Children Audio Books of All Times
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.
Kids Classical Stories across culture and time
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.
Using Audio Books for Learning Languages
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.
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!
Classical Children Audio Books
Often stories told to children come back in time hundreds of years, and they are about fantasies and adventures, that even though old, hold some universal truths. At that time, chivalry and valor were the highest values, and the stories relate the fight between virtue and devil. These features still captivate young minds and they are positive by all means.
So it’s no surprise if we still hold to tell our children stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, where King Arthur with the help of his brave knights, saves the kingdom from the wicked. Merlin the wise on the other hand fights the wicked Morgana enchantments. Robin Hood the legend, dressed in green and armed with his eternal longbow rules the Sherwood Forest and robs the wicked rich to save the nice poor.
In the audio book world, these stories come with digital audio effects, good narration and crisp dialogues, and they are sometimes accompanied with theme songs.
From another age and another land, Sheherazade night after night still tells the same stories of Aladdin and his magic lamp, that of Sinbad the sailor, that of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and other tales cherished by children and adults worldwide.
In the audiobook version, the scenes are perfectly set with delightful oriental music.All in all, it’s a delightful treat for young listeners.
Also from another age and land, and for a trip in the medieval fantasy, Farmer Giles of Ham, a fat and lazy guy becomes a hero when a giant and later a dragon come his way.
The stories mentioned above are just a one hand count of the hundreds of children audio books available, that could be very precious to your kids, and that can be downloaded online in mp3 format or ordered online and shipped to you on CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disks