Five Tips For Introducing Audiobooks To Your Kids

We get a lot of questions about how and why we introduced audiobooks to our kids. Hugo has been listening to audiobooks since he was about two-and-a-half years old and now, at almost five, he can sit down and listen to audiobooks that last as long as an hour. This has been wonderful in many situations, like road trips, busy moments at home, or when he really needs some down time. We use audiobooks like other people use screens but, since we hardly ever sit Hugo in front of a screen, audiobooks do the trick for him when it comes to keeping his attention! In this post, we’ll set out some of the benefits of audiobooks, five tips for getting your kid hooked on them, some of our recommendations for great audiobooks, and suggestions on where to get them.

The Benefits of Audiobooks

There are many benefits to listening to books. The benefits of reading to children are well known. Given that the mental work done by children when they listen to an audiobook is similar to being read a book by a parent, experts believe that the benefits of listening to audiobooks are similar to those of reading.

Some of these benefits include: developing listening skills and quiet concentration, fostering imagination and encouraging visualization, and improving reading comprehension. Audiobooks also model fluent reading, which has been shown to have a positive impact on children’s oral reading fluency. Also (as we’ve discovered with of our son), audiobooks allow children to access books that are above their level, exposing them to more advanced vocabulary and more complex sentence structure. 

Audiobooks also present a series of benefits for children who have difficulty reading; for example, blind children, children with lower reading levels, and ESL children are able to engage with literature through audiobooks.

Five Tips for Introducing Audiobooks to Your Kids

If you are looking at introducing audiobooks to your kids, here are some tips on how to do it:

1. Start with books they are familiar with. What is your kid’s favorite book? If you start with a story your kid already likes a lot, it’s more likely he or she will enjoy listening to the audiobook.

2. What subjects is your kid interested in? Firetrucks? Dinosaurs? Dogs? Whatever it is, try to find books about it. For example, our kid was fascinated with dinosaurs (what three-year old isn’t?), so I did a search of audiobooks on iTunes and, voila, I had a list to choose from! This is also a great way to teach your kids about a specific subject. For example, we were in Transylvania earlier this year and we wanted to find a kid-friendly story about Dracula, so we looked at audiobooks and found the series Dracula Investigates.

3. The classics, like The Three Little Pigs, are also a good place to start. You’ll see there are a lot of versions of these stories. Find the one you like best by sampling the audiobooks before getting them. Some versions are really well done!

4. Listen to the audiobooks with your kid at least one time. Kids love talking about their experiences and, if they see you are interested in the books, they’ll probably be too.

5. Find stories with great narrators. A good narrator brings the story to life with humor, good timing, and enjoyable intonation.

Some Audiobook Recommendations

These are some of our favorite titles/authors for young children:

• Eric Carle books like The Very Quiet Cricket and The Very Hungry Caterpillar are great books to start with
• All of Julia Donaldson’s books are great as audiobooks
• All of Dr. Seuss books
• The classic stories, like Three Little Pigs, The Gingerbread Man, Goldilocks, etc. (and later you can try versions that are clever twists on the classics)
• The Little Engine that Could
• Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel

For older or more advanced readers/listeners, here are some of our favorite chapter-book series audiobooks:

• Cam Jensen by David A. Adler
• Nate the Great by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
• Horrible Harry by Suzy Kline
• Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne
• The Magic School Bus by Joanna Cole
• Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol
• Dinosaur World by Geoffrey T. Williams

In a lot of cases, after listening to the audiobooks, our son has been really excited to come across a paper copy of a lot of these chapter books!

We have also downloaded audiobooks based on movies. Our son loves listening to the Cars 3 audiobook and he recently listened to Finding Nemo. We carefully prescreen the movies we let him watch and, by listening to the audiobook, we know exactly what the movie will be about before we let him watch it.

Where to Get Audiobooks

We have bought 99% of the audiobooks so that we own them. However, there are also a lot of websites that offer free audiobooks and podcasts for children. Here’s a list of some recommendations:

• Hoopla is a digital media service offered by public libraries that allows you to borrow audiobooks (and a lot more!) and download them to your electronic device of choice to enjoy later. 
• Overdrive App. Like with Hoopla, you can use Overdrive to enjoy audiobooks from your library’s digital collection.
• Podcasts: Some good ones for children are Wow in the World, Brains On, Story Pirates, and Tumble Science.
• Storynory

Pro tip: If you are going to purchase audiobooks, look for bundles before you buy them individually. A lot of times you’ll get a deal if you buy more than one book at once.

We have found audiobooks to be fun for the entire family. They make our road trips a lot more enjoyable, and we have definitely seen our son’s vocabulary and comprehension improve well beyond his age since he started listening to them. Our daughter, who just turned 2 years old, has also started requesting her own audiobooks now (she’s been listening to her brother’s since she was born!).

Hope these tips are useful! Enjoy and happy listening!