Audiobooks + Legos = Everyone’s Happy
Many of you are in week three of school at home, and many of you are trying to juggle work with supporting young learners. In light of that, we wanted to affirm a literacy practice that you can set up and step away from: audiobooks.
Here’s how you do it: get your child playing with Legos, blocks, coloring pages, or another engaging activity that goes well with listening to a book.
Then, walk away.
Some children prefer a time limit. Others might need to start with a short amount of time, like 15 mins, and build to a longer amount of time, like 30-45 mins.
(Side note: please don’t walk away forever. As we wrote this post, we got a little worried that someone might take ‘walk away’ too literally.)
Audiobooks, podcasts, and narrated e-books allow students to access levels of text that they might not be able to read independently. By engaging with those higher levels of text, students explore new ideas and thoughts about reading - just like they would with a read aloud – which we talked about in this post (LINK) last fall. That means that, while listening to an audiobook, children are exposed to vocabulary and complex sentence structures that enrich their literary understanding.
Specifically, with audiobooks, Mohamed (2018) found that students learning English who used audiobooks had higher increases in listening comprehension as opposed to students who did not. Cahill & Moore (2017) have discussed audiobooks’ multiple benefits for readers in detail
Another bonus of listening to audiobooks? Children report that listening to read-alouds helps them to feel relaxed and happy (Ledger & Merga, 2018). We want that right now.
Here are some resources to access free audiobooks, narrated books, and podcasts at home right now.
Audible - Audible stories provides audio books for all ages. There are books on this website in Spanish, French, Japanese, German, and Italian as well.
Unite for Literacy - This website provides a variety of children's books that can be narrated in different languages (with English, too). They also have books that are written in Spanish.
The Open Library – Here, you can access thousands of books in English and in other languages. Making an account is free!
And what if your child is all about podcasts? Those work, too:
Circle Round - This podcast from WBUR features retellings of folk tales from around the world with an all-start cast of readers.
But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids - This podcast from VPR answers kids’ questions about life, the universe, and everything - from why bees sting to how cars work. Check out the episode on chocolate to hear a question from CLC-Director Bethany Silva’s son)
Civics 101 - This podcast, from New Hampshire Public Radio, is an amazing resource to learn all about the government, US history, and more! Middle-schoolers and older who are interested in how the country works will find this very interesting.
Want more resources?
Check out the Multilingual Book Club page in the Tinder and Flint Blog. You can access that here!
Resources:
Cahill, M., & Moore, J. (2017). A Sound History: Audiobooks Are Music to Children’s Ears. Children & Libraries, 15(1), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.5860/cal.15n1.22
Ledger, S., & Merga, M. (2018). Reading Aloud: Children’s Attitudes toward being Read to at Home and at School. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 124–139. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2018v43n3.8
Mohamed, M. (2018). Using Audiobooks for Developing Listening Comprehension among Saudi EFL Preparatory Year Students. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9(1), 64–73. https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0901.08
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