Sweet Pea is 48 months old.
I am always running out of audio books for Sweet Pea. We have listened to the entire Little House series, Anne of Green Gables, all of Ramona, Henry and Ribsy, Winnie the Pooh, a few Magic Treehouses and as much of Junie B. Jones as I could stand. (Which was exactly 1 book. Seriously, does Junie use any adjective other than the word “stupid”?)
Recently, a friend of mine (Thanks Danielle!) suggested I look up storynory.org and I loved it so much that I wanted to share it with you.
Storynory has so many great stories and they are all FREE! I was skeptical at first, because I didn’t think free audio recordings would be of very high quality, but I am so glad I tried it. Everything we have listened to so far has been fantastic. You can download all the audio stories from their site, subscribe by podcast, or even just read them as text. I subscribed to the podcast this week and we love it!
There are all sorts of stories, including fairy tales, classic authors and even some original content. Most of the stories are short, probably around 15 minutes. My favorites so far have been Swan Lake and The Tortoise and the Geese.
Here is a funny anecdote about our first experience listening to Storynory. The stories are beautifully read by Natasha or Elizabeth, both of whom have British accents. When we listened to our first story, Sweet Pea immediately interrupted, saying, “Stop! Stop! What is wrong with her voice?” I did not understand Sweet Pea’s confusion at first, but quickly realized that she hadn’t heard someone speak with an accent before. It was very cute, but I had to answer seemingly endless questions about accents before we could return to our story. 🙂
Storynory is a great site and highly recommended for all ages. We have only run into 1 story that I thought was too old for Sweet Pea (from “The 1001 Arabian Nights”), but the story was introduced with a warning so I was easily able to skip it.
If you are searching for good audio books for your family, give Storynory a try!
Rating: 4 Stars * (Fun, Easy, Independent, Frugal)
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Best wishes to Sweet Pea and the family from Storynory. We are delighted that you enjoy our stories. We will have to think about overcoming people’s initial skepticism about “free” and “quality”. We can’t really boast “high quality” because that will make people even more resistant. I would be interested if you have any thoughts. Do keep listening. The Bull and the Donkey from the 1001 nights is probably fine for young children by the way. Thank you for the lovely write-up.
Thanks for the info, we listened to a story today and we will be listening to more in the future!
I’m so glad you’re enjoying Storynory too! (And learn from my mistake – Skip the Frog and Toad audiobooks.)
Hi Shannon,
Perhaps you could try this
http://www.kiddierecords.com/
I have not tried this yet due to lack of time and don’t know how to set it all up for my kids. (computer problems)
Do let me know how it goes and perhaps how to do it.
Sook-Mei
I will try to take a look at that site and see if I can get any of the old recordings to work.