Sunday, February 3, 2008

Children's Audio Books and Online Library Fun




Right now, I spend a lot of time reading many books about the publishing industry as I prepare to release my debut children's book Sunny's Adventures in March of this year. I notice that the information I'm learning about comes in any format you need. I can read an actual book, listen to an audio CD, dial in to a teleseminar, study online or take classroom courses. These array of options must be available because it's a known fact that we all learn and digest information differently. I'm more of a reader myself because I like to mark up books I'm studying with bright colored highlighters. Well, you have to figure that children are no different from adults in that they can be mentally stimulated in all sorts of ways as well. Of course nothing should take the place of academic learning in the classroom, reading actual books, or going to the library. However, there are some supplemental learning tools out there that shouldn't be passed up either for them because they can be put in the "fun" category. Here are just a few ideas:

1. AUDIO BOOKS are a great way to help children to enjoy reading. Just imagine being on a car trip with restless kids in the back seat. You can pop in an audio book on CD and create a much better traveling experience for them as they listen to a book being narrated with sounds to enhance the story. You can even play the CD at home when their settling down for the night, or while they look at the book, beginning readers can listen along with the audio version. You're also helping them to develop their listening and comprehension skills as well. Try http://www.squidoo.com/childrens_audio-books and view some of the various audio picks there. Another pick is http://www.spoken-books.com/help.html. You can download them instantly or copy them to a CD. Click under the "juvenille" section for kids and there's hundreds of adult picks as well.

2. ONLINE LIBRARY access is a great learning choice for kids too. There are hundreds and hundreds of these sorts of sites on the web. I found http://www.mikids.com/Library.htm and what I like about this site is you can just click on the grade level of your child (K - 5th grade). Kids can listen to audio books or read for themselves and there's fun learning games as well. Another good site is http://www.awesomelibrary.org/student.html as it has much more detail and actually provides many links for all kinds of kids sites. Kids can even ask experts questions about any topic and receive the answer to their question. It can be about health, science, arts - just a wealth of subjects to choose from.

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