Posts Tagged ‘Kids Story Books’

Children Audio Books for fun

Children Audio Books (also recognized as audio books) can be good fun for boys and girls, irrespective of whether they are enjoying them at home or while travelling. If you are going on a summer family trip with your own small children, be sure and carry a number of mp3 audiobooks with you; they could help to make the car, train, or plane trip much more enjoyable for your young children. There are at the same time a lot of other advantages of listening to children audio books. You will definitely find that audiobook editions of a large number of famous ebooks for young ones are on the market. Below is a sampling of some interesting Children Audio Books.

Children Audio Books 1. The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders

The audio book edition of The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders unveils another of the abilities of creator Jack Prelutsky; he is also a musician. Your small children won’t be able to resist the humorous poems set to music and sung by Prelutsky, who also plays the guitar together with John Guth. The musical arrangements by Guth feature bass guitar, mandolin, percussion, and keyboards. I know from practical experience that 2- to 4-year-olds really like to listen to this recording time and time again.

Children Audio Books 2. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book 1)

Introduce your teenagers to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians collection with the audiobook release of the 1st book, The Lightning Thief. The actual collection has confirmed to be tremendously famous with middle school learners, as well as upper elementary age youngsters. This fantasy series features an captivating middle school pupil, Percy Jackson, and the fantastic revelations and journeys that change his life. Author Rick Riordan includes a lot of Ancient mythology in the series, to superb benefit.

Children Audio Books 3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter Series, Book One)

Expose your boys and girls to the Harry Potter collection (or start rereading them all), starting with the audiobook release of the 1st book in the set, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. With this fantasy novel by J. K. Rowlings, you are going to appreciate hrs of mystery, suspense, wizardry, and pleasure. I’d advise this for families with youngsters 8-10 years old and older.

Children Audio Books 4. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Everybody has a poor day, and the entire household will get a kick out of Alexander’s problems in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. The audio book release of the tale is read by actress Blythe Danner. While I advise it for four to eight year olds, it will probably attract dads and moms at the same time.

Children Audio Books 5. A Bear Called Paddington

The scenario of the little bear from darkest Peru who travels to The united kingdom and finds himself on Paddington Stop is a classic. The little bear is adopted by the Brown family who name him Paddington. Paddington gets into all sorts of entertaining hardships, and the Browns find their everyday life spun upside down. This kids audio book is read by actor and comedian Stephen Fry, whose English accent and sympathetic reading make it a pleasure. I recommend it for age ranges 5-9.

More Children Audio Books Resources

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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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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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