Mind Games

After soccer this morning, Annick and I were chatting about taking long car trips with our boys. She mentioned that her 3 year old has one of the kids’ mp3 players and loves it, so I told her I’d pass along the sites I know of with free mp3 stories. There turned out to be a lot of them in my bookmarks, so I decided to post them all here.

Storynory is a site from the UK that has tons of free stories (75+) including lots of fairy tales, myths and fables.

Whootie Owl has 8 free stories available – fables from different cultures that speak to “facing adversity” and “caring for others.”

Light Up Your Brain has about 16 stories read by the site’s host, Chuck Brown. There are several Beatrix Potter stories here, a few fairy tales, and some others.

Candlelight Stories has 5 free fairy tales, including one from China and one from Japan.

The Kids’ Corner at Wired for Books includes more dramatic readings of Alice in Wonderland, Beatrix Potter, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. There are also several readings and recordings on the main site for adults or teens, including lots of poetry and short stories, and Book I of the Iliad read in Ancient Greek. Just in case you’re curious.

At Project Gutenberg you can find lots and lots of free mp3s of all kinds, including lots of the Oz books, the full Alice in Wonderland, Aesop’s Fables, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Heidi, etc. Most of these, since they’re full books, are many files long.

A similar site is LibriVox, which also hosts readings of public domain works. You can choose to search by genre and then select “children” to find nearly 200 recordings of children’s books, including The Wind in the Willows, Just So Stories, The Velveteen Rabbit, Five Children and It, etc.

One of our very favorites is Kiddie Records Weekly, which has stories from the “golden age” – of 78s! – and includes lots of great old stories, the Bozo records, The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins, Alice in Wonderland, The House at Pooh Corner, The Carrot Seed, Uncle Wiggly, Tubby the Tuba, Peter and the Wolf, etc. Many of these were originally more than one record, and so are more than one file to download. They’ve been doing this for 3 years so there are something like 150 stories available.

Audio Stories 4 Kids is a similar site, this one out of the UK. Many of the offerings are the same, but there are a few unique ones, like Long Name No Can Say, which is another version of Tikki Tikki Tembo – and this site has 4 Ludwig Bemelmans stories, including Madeline.

Conscious Living Foundation also has older recordings – the ones we listened to were all from the radio program “Let’s Pretend,” including Princess Moonbeam and Ceres and Proserpina.

Our other very favorite online audio book site is the Robert Munsch site – this is the author himself reading about 50 of his own books – Love You Forever, Andrew’s Loose Tooth, Stephanie’s Ponytail, Thomas’ Snowsuit, Murmel Murmel Murmel, etc. Every one is so much fun.

There! That should get you to Florida and back.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 1:31 pm and is filed under good stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.