Saturday Spot: The Hifi and Friends Part Two…

Last week I said I would post on the specific bits and bobs that go onto my kids i-pods/shuffles. Well after a week of seriously sifting out old podcasts and unsubscribing to heaps of them and deleting ones that no one wanted to listen to we are down to an acceptable 300 downloads to listen to as apposed to the 1500 that were pending – aaahhh just too daunting!!! Now that’s a spring clean…

And here they are, Se7en things that go onto their ipods/shuffles:

• Something for school from Sonlight: Their Bible Songs, Geography Songs, History songs, Lyrical Life Sciences and so on.



• Bible reading: I pop the book they are reading from for school onto their shuffles. We use Max Mclean (ESV) and he reads like a dream, we all enjoy it.
  

  

• Classical Music: The real thing, but I also pop kids classics on to their machines. My favorite kids Classical CD is this one:
  

  

  And they love these stories that portray something of the great composer in a story. They aren’t biographical but they do give a flavor of the musician and all the music used in the stories is by the relevant composer.

  

  

• Musicals: I have a Hood who totally loves these and would just about die without: Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang… Die I tell you!!!

  

• Audio Books: We have a couple of favorites of these and everybody loves them!

  

• Free on-line books: There are tons of on-line books available for free, mostly on Classic Story sites because older books are now in the public domain… look for stories like Heidi, the Wind in the Willows, and we all recently loved Anne of Green Gables.
  • LibriVox – classical books in the public domain.
  • Free Classic AudioBooks – more classical books in the public domain.
  • Free Christian Audiobooks – great for biographies.
  • Kids Audio Books – With some of my all time favorites from when I was a kid, dare I say: “Sparky and his Magic Piano.”
  • Podiobooks – These are books written for podcasts… and some of them are brilliant. Some of them are totally inappropriate I wouldn’t leave these unattended at all, but there are some really great gems in there that I have downloaded for our kids. Pirate Jack was a huge winner, we all thoroughly enjoyed it!
• Podcasts: I get all our podcasts down in i-tunes, but wherever possible I have given you the website… if you search in i-tunes you should find the link to subscribe.
  • Living Books for the Ears – A weekly classic story in old radio style.
  • Puffin Podcast: This podcast has interviews with top kid authors and extracts from their latest books. If you look in their archives they had a brilliant series of extracts from the Puffin Classics read by top kid authors – really brilliant!
  • Fun Music Radio – My kids love to listen to Fun Radio Guinness World Record.
  • Pod Stories: Things like the Quangle Wangle and the Lighthouse Keeper Stories. The link is at the bottom of the webpage.
  • The Story Home: – These are classic fairy tales, like the Snow Goose and so on.
  • Storynory – stories, stories, stories…
  • BBC Learning: There is so much on this site that it literally blows your mind!!! My kids love the dance and music classes. And there is a weekly news for kids podcast as well.

That’s it – for now!!! They have a couple of other podcasts that they listen to and watch, mostly science and history goodies… but enough is enough and I will post those resources another time!!!

After Thought: For those of you who want to know how to set the volume limit on your kids i-pods and shuffles and protect those little ears from excessive enthusiasm (!)… there are directions on the apple site and here is the link for you.

That’s it – Happy Listening to you all!!!

I popped this post onto the Works For Me Wednesday Site – go and have a look there for all sorts of tips on absolutely anything.