What The Klassen’s Read – Audio Books For Kids

Audio books have played a huge part in our lives this summer. Between a weekend in Edmonton (11 hours round trip), multiple trips to the lake for camping and fishing (at least 18 hours all together), we’ve spend a lot of those hours listening to audio books. It hasn’t even just been on long drives either, if we are driving in the vehicle for more than 5 minutes Raeca usually asks to listen to a story and I’m happy to do so, I love that she listens so well, uses her imagination and asks lots of questions (okay, so sometimes I could do with a few less questions).

I thought I’d share a few of our favorites from the summer:

The Little House on the Prairie Series – we listened to Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie and are currently on Farmer Boy. Raeca now wants to go for a ride in the wagon and will randomly switch from calling us Mommy and Daddy to Ma and Pa, and she, of course, is Laura; I think it’s adorable. I love how educational the series is as to life a hundred-ish years ago. After we complete Farmer Boy we definitely plan on going through the rest of the series. My only complaint is the way the reader pronounces some of the words, but I can get over it for such a good story. So far I think each book has been between 5-6 hours of audio.

Chronicles of Narnia Series – so far we’ve only listened to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. At three years old it was maybe a bit above Raeca, with no previous Narnia exposure. She did follow along pretty well but I think Jared and I enjoyed it more than she did. Maybe once we finish The Little House Series we can look into more of these. The version we listened to was read by Michael York, who does an excellent job, I would definitely recommend finding that one. I think the one we listened to was between 4-5 hours long.

Adventures in Odyssey – Jared grew up listening to this series and him and his siblings are still quoting random lines from it to this day. It’s technically not an audio book but in the same general theme so I’m including it. Raeca loves these, we’ve been listening to them together for about a year now. I love how it began as a Christian radio program and each episode has some kind of lesson in it. If you’ve never listened to any I’d suggest starting at the beginning so you can get a little background on the characters, if that’s not possible, it’s still a good listen even if you get a random episode. I believe each episode is usually about 20 minutes (there are multiple episodes on a disc).

Fortunately the Milk – to be honest, we haven’t finished this one yet, it’s short (only an hour long), I started it a few weeks ago while I was making supper in the kitchen and Raeca was helping me. I found it pretty funny so I started it over when Jared came home and then part way through our CD player died. I can’t even tell you how it ends but the beginning is pretty funny, I don’t think Rae quite catches on to the humor, it’s probably better for 6-8 year olds but now I want to know how it ends!

Those have been our favorites so far! We did take out The Little Princess from the library (the movie was a favorite of mine growing up) but I decided we should probably finish one series before adding in a bunch of other random books. In the future I would also like to listen to The Boxcar Children, Wizard of Oz and other such classics.

Do you listen to audio books with kids?
Which have been your favorites?