Free Audio Books For Children at Librivox.org

My daughter loves (and I don't just means loves, I mean LOVES) stories.  Story books, long books with chapters, anything with words she loves.  I used stories to wean her when she was little.  She was three and I was done with nursing (some might think that's way to long, others not long enough, but it was what worked for us).  It was easy to cut down to just nursing at bedtime and naptime to get her to sleep but beyond that it got complicated.  So I started reading to her.  I actually pulled a trick I learned when I use to babysit my siblings and picked up books that were children's books, books she would understand, but where still mostly way over her head so she would eventually get bored and fall asleep to the droning of my voice.  We read all the Little House Books, all the Narnia books, and many, many others in a very short period of time.  It worked wonderfully for our family and as she was my first I had all the time in the world to do this with her.

During her waking hours we read tons too.  I would got to the library and come home with mountains of books that we would read every week and then return the next.  She loved it and soaked up everything story she could get her hands on (or get someone to read to her).

We kept on reading loads until my second child started getting older and needing more attention (she was between 4-5 and my second would have been 6 mo to a year).  I just didn't have the time or energy to read all the time to her.  I started looking for books on disk at the library and found a few, but to be honest I wasn't super impressed with the selection.  So I started looking online.  I was thrilled when I found Librivox.org!  Hundreds and thousands of audio books that are in the public domain (meaning they're free!).  At first I wasn't entirely sure what to look for, but I searched for "children" under genre and found tons of books.  Some we have liked much better then others.  Librivox was a way that I could fulfill my daughters needs and love of stories, without needing to be the one reading with her all day long.  (And I do mean all day.  If I let her she could easily listen to stories all day and never stir from the couch.)

We still read, more now that my two youngest are interested in sitting and listening to stories, but my daughter still loves and finds comfort in the librivox stories she has come to know and love so well.  And our whole family really enjoys them.  There are times I'll be hanging laundry, she'll be listening to a story and looking at a book, my boys will be playing legos and my husband doing something else and we're all just enjoying to story together.  There are many times my husband or I will start laughing at the antics of The Treasure Seekers or Anne's dreamy speeches in Anne of Green Gables.

So here are our favorite stories read by our favorite readers.  There are many, many more, but these are the ones my daughter asks for over and over again.  I hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

• Little Women and Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
• The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Burgess Animal Book for Children  and The Burgess Bird Book for Children (and anything else by Thornton W. Burgess)
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
• The Railway Children,  Nine Unlikely Tales,   The Story of the Treasure Seekers,  The Wouldbegoods, all by  E. (Edith) Nesbit
• Pollyanna by Eleanor H Porter
• Heidi by Johanna Spyri
• Raggedy Andy Stories  and Raggedy Ann Stories by Johnny Gruelle

WARNING NOTE - These stories are old and and are full of old ideas and old language.  My daughter on several occasions has pointed to someone at a store and said "That person looks so gay," or "That person has a queer look," thankfully out of earshot of the person.  While she was using the word correctly for what she meant, the meaning has changed over the last 100 years.  We were able to explain that some people would get upset hearing that because the it doesn't mean the same thing it did when the story was written and that she should use the words happy or strange.  I've also been surprised occasionally to listen to a story I use to love (recently Peter Pan) and be rudely reminded of how much older I wish my kids were before listening to it.  Violence, chauvinism and at one point talk of a "fairy orgy" (not something I'm willing to explain to an 8 year old), it was a bit shocking.  So it is a good thing to check out these stories ahead a time to make sure you are ok with your kids listening to them.  Many stories I have little problems with but am willing to overlook because the rest of the story is so good an it doesn't seem to effect my kids negatively.

Home/ Unschooling

I want to start out by saying that I, by no means, am a guru.  I've just been doing this for a while.

I was home/unschooled growing up, as was my husband and about 98% of our friends.  So it was natural for us to decided to do the same for our kids.  When my oldest was still very young I had great faith in complete child-led learning (allowing her to lead me in her education thinking this was unschooling) and swore to myself I would never push education on her.  But then she started getting older and as she approached school age I started to panic.
"What Was I Thinking!?!?  How on earth can anyone learn anything by themselves!?  And what if she doesn't want to learn something important!?  Like what 9 x 4 is or how to read!?"
Of course, she had already taught herself basic addition and subtraction and had been read more of the classics then I ever was exposed to at that point and would practice writing by copying bits out of her story books.  I knew she was no dummy.  But what if I was and I was going to screw her up by not teaching her the important things?

We did complete child led learning until she was 6.  Minnesota's mandatory age for schooling starts at 7 and I was terrified that if I didn't start teaching her at least the letters of the alphabet, then it would be the end of the world.  I bought Oak Meadows entire kindergarten curriculum.  It was the curriculum my husband used when they first started homeschooling and is sorta Waldorf-y/Montessori-y (or maybe it is actually one of the two I can't remember).  I was going to be a teacher, with curriculum and be cool.  Like Mrs. Jeffers, only not so scary.  The curriculum was good, and would have been fun, if she had been 4 instead of an advanced 6.  She hated doing the baby work and after about 3 weeks of desperately trying to teach her something, I gave up with the curriculum.  I wasn't to worried since we still had the whole year before we actually started reporting.  We talked a lot, sang songs, read stories and I printed lots of workpages for her.  We just went back to the child led learning and it was a lot better then trying to force the "baby stuff."

Last year my daughter turned 7 and we started school like we had before.  Only this time I gave up on the curriculum idea and just went to workbooks.  I got Brain Quest Workbooks (grades pre-k through 1st) and the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (which we both love!).  I got a new math workbook and just let her have at it.  I got the teachers guide to and tried (in vain) to teach her again.  That was pretty much a waste of time and money.  She devoured the mathbook mostly on her own and we worked together when she was learning something new and she started to read and write more.  She listened to stories about nature, we printed more work/coloring pages, watched documentaries and she was fascinated by the Ancient Egyptians.  In Minnesota there is mandatory testing and I was nervous about it.  But her scores were advanced in everything but reading and writing (we knew those would be lower) and we were all thrilled.  Apparently neither of us were dummys!  Hurray!

We have just started our second year.  We're working with a new mathbook that is entirely to easy so she's been bored a lot lately and I'm trying to skip ahead as much as I can without leaving something important behind.  We're working on learning reading still, but it's going fast and every time we do another lesson I feel so proud that my little girl is reading and I helped her learn that!  I found fabulous social studies and science curriculums that she is loving and it's been easy to tailor information so my 4 year old can learn with her.

Like I said, I'm no guru.  I've had experience being the home learner, and now as the "teacher".  We do fight, but it's mostly over the fact that her brother gets to watch Diego while she has to read or that the math is to easy or that I wont let her look at one of the world history books.  Such big problems, I know.

I just want all of you out there to know, that even having been home/unschooled, married an unschooler and known hundreds of amazing home/unschooled people, I still get insecure.  I'm the one that usually makes it hard for us.  I still push for somethings and I feel like I want to have some structure to her days.  I feel like we are working together a lot more and she is teaching me how she needs to be taught.  I remember my mom telling me once that she learned so much more when she homeschooled us then she ever did from her own school education, and now I see why.
It's kinda cool actually.