Children's Books On CD

A familiar chant to be heard coming from the back of our car at the beginning of a journey is "story, story, story".

My children are both huge fans of listening to children's books on CD (or even downloaded to the iPod and played over the car radio). As soon as I press play, quiet descends on the car as my normally vocal boys listen intently, interrupting only occasionally to clarify the meaning of a word.

There are many advantages of encouraging your child to listen to children's books on CD (in addition to calmer car journeys), although try not to let it substitute reading aloud to your child yourself also.

Audiobooks let your child enjoy books that are above her reading level and provide a good model for fluent reading. They help to develop listening skills and are a good way of enriching your child's vocabulary and introducing her to unfamiliar dialects or old-fashioned literary styles. Hearing a book read aloud by a talented storyteller can really bring a story to life, highlighting humour where it might have been missed, and adding drama and intrigue to a story. Listening to children's books on CD also helps to expand your child's background knowledge by using otherwise 'dead' time in the car to introduce her to new situations and experiences.

All of these advantages of audiobooks provide a big boost to improving your child's own reading skills.

Our Favorite Audiobooks

One of the first children's books on CD which we listened to when my sons were 3 and 5 years old was a collection of four short stories by Roald Dahl called Fantastic Mr Fox and Other Animal Stories. As well as the story in the title, it also contains recordings of "The Giraffe and Pelly and Me", "Esio Trot" and "The Enormous Crocodile". We have listened to all of these stories endlessly since and they remain firm favorites of the entire family. There are other Roald Dahl collections which are sure to be equally good. We have also enjoyed:

On my list of children's books on CD to try next are the How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell and read by David Tennant and The Giggler Treatment by Roddy Doyle (apparently there's lots of talk about poo in it, so I'm sure my boys will love it).

Other Recommended Lists of Audiobooks

For more ideas of enjoyable children's books on CD have a browse through the winners of the Notable Children's Recordings List, which the Association for Library Service to Children compiles each year of the best of the best in children's recordings.

An interesting list of recommended children's books on cd can also be found at Capitol Choices. Each year since 1996 a group of librarians, teachers, booksellers and other children's literature specialists around the Washington, D.C. area select a list of outstanding books and audiobooks for children up to the age of sixteen. For each recommendation in the list of audiobooks there is a brief synopsis and a suggested age range, although unfortunately the list is not searchable by age range. Most of the audiobooks are for ages 9 and over although there are some suggestions for younger children.

Each year a list of Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults is announced by The Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, featuring notable audio recordings for ages 12-18 years.

You can also find good suggestions on the Parents' Choice Award Winners website in the Audio Book category.

Other lists of children's books on CD worth checking out are:

• The Ten Best Children's Audio Books from The Independent newspaper in the UK.
• Listen to This! Audio Books from Reading Rockets.
• The Travel Savvy Mom's age-by-age guide to the best audiobooks for kids.

Audiobooks On-line

Of course, in this day and age you do not have to buy the CD to listen to the book, you can just download it on-line. There are a few interesting options for downloading free audiobooks specifically for children.

Storynory has an online library of free audio stories for children (read with a British accent) which you can listen to on your computer, download in mp3 format or subscribe with iTunes for easy upload to your iPod . There is a mixture of new stories, fairy tales, and specially adapted myths and histories. The Story Home is another great source of free stories for children, this time read with an American accent. As with Storynory, these stories can be played on your computer or easily downloaded to an iPod or iPhone. iPhone apps also exist for both of these websites.

Librivox.org provides free audiobooks recorded by volunteers of books which are in the public domain in the USA, generally meaning the book was published before 1923. You can find classics such as 'Little Women', 'Peter Pan', 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' and 'The Secret Garden'. Their site provides a text listing of all recordings available but is not visually very easy to browse. I much prefer browsing the Children's section of Books Should Be Free, which draws on these Librivox recordings and other public domain sources to deliver free audio books available for browsing in a visual and entertaining way.

To purchase audiobooks on-line try audible.com in the USA or audible.co.uk in the UK.

Happy listening!

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