With a 30-45 minute drive to and from school every day the kids and I have a lot of time in the car together every day. To fill that time I have found a few free audio short stories for kids that we have all quite enjoyed…
- Paws and Tails
- Kids Corner
- The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast
- Karen and Kids
- Sesame Street Podcast (Video)
Of these five I think that Paws and Tails and Kids Corner are our favourites. They are similar in their premise, but with their own unique characters and situations. Both of those shows have their characters based on young animals, which ads for an interesting twist.
The Kids Corner and Paws and Tails kids audio programs are built around a few main characters attending middle school. They deal with the issues that face children of that age and have lead to some pretty good conversations between me and the kids.
Paws and Tails is especially good at facilitating discussion as in addition to the free audio short story you can also download a free parents study guide for each episode. The study guides include different sections including story comprehension, personal application, spiritual application as well as directors notes. The guide helps us to talk though with the children what the story was about, what it means and how they can apply it to their own lives.
While checking out the site for this article I found that Kids Corner also has free parent discussion guides available for free on their web-site. We haven’t tried them yet, but after a quick review they look pretty good.
Kids Corner and Paws And Tails are both repurposed radio programs so they run between 25 – 27 minutes each episode, which is perfect for our time frame in the car since it lets us listen to it and then talk a bit about it during our drive.
The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast follows along with the radio program and usually has behind the scenes commentary and feedback about the stories. Every once in a while though they release a free full episode of The Adventures in Odyssey. These are great stories and look at many different biblical stories and relevant topics. So far in the year and half or so that I have been subscribed I have pulled in 18 free full episodes.
Karen and Kids is built around music and story telling. It seems to be geared to a slightly younger age and Jessica loves this one. We probably don’t listen to it enough for her to learn the songs, but I’m sure if she were to listen more she would be bopping along to the songs in no time.
The Sesame Street Podcast is a weekly video podcast. Every video is about 6-minutes long and includes your usual cast of characters from Sesame Street, and occasionally a guest host.
Lately the Sesame Street Podcast has been going through the alphabet during their episodes. Although we can’t watch the videos in the car, these prove to be invaluable on the iPod Touch when we have a long wait at appointments or when shopping.
Do you know of any other free kids short story audio programs that you think should be included? If so, let us know in the comments below …
[…] the last few years my children have been listening to the same few podcasts. We found our favourites back in 2010, and have sticking with them ever […]