Do you hate reading aloud? Or are you unable to, for as long as your kids want you to? Or do you just never have time to sit and read? At times I agree with all three of these statements! I want to share a great resource I’ve known about for a long time, but haven’t really used until this week. Librivox has a fantastic assortment of audio recordings of public domain books! When I go there, I specifically search for the books we use with An Old Fashioned Education, as well as other books that my kids might enjoy listening to. Sometimes in the evening, I set up my laptop in their bedroom and they can listen to a chapter or two of a book after they go to bed. (I’ve lost my voice at this point, due to a nasty sinus infection, and reading aloud isn’t even possible!) You can either listen on the site, or you can download the audio files (mp3) to your computer to listen to later. You can search by title or by author, but for ease, I searched out some titles for you:
OFE3 Titles:
Famous Men of Greece by John Haaren
Famous Men of Rome by John Haaren
Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers by John Burroughs
Other Children’s Titles:
Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt by James Baikie
The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin (We own this little book and I love it!)
Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children by Jane Andrews
Children’s Book Collections by Author:
Thornton W. Burgess (Bird Book, Animal Adventures, etc.)
Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden & many others)
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Men, etc.)
Louis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland, etc.)
Frank L. Baum (The Wizard of Oz series)
Robert Michael Ballantyne (Ballantyne’s adventure books for boys)
And for the Adults:
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (I am in the midst of listening to this right now)
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
If you want to do a search for your favorite titles, but don’t want to download the mp3 files, you can go to File>Save Page As>Web page, complete. This will save an icon (mine is a Firefox icon) with the title, to a file of your choosing on your computer. I have a file titled “Audio Books” in My Documents which I use to store these. Then you will just double-click the icon and it will bring you to the webpage with the audio files. This will only work if you are already connected to the internet, so on dial-up it will probably prompt you to log on (we have broadband).
Works for me!
Momma’s Talk