Blogger: Rachel Kent
I hope you are all doing all right during these crazy times! Hang in there, friends.
My kids and I have been enjoying some of the great book resources available out there on the internet.
One of the things we’ve been doing is listening to audiobooks for FREE at stories.audible.com. Most of the books are for children, but there are some good classics on there, too. We just finished the first Harry Potter book on audiobook. It was fun to listen together! 🙂
Our local library also has many online resources for kids and adults. Electronic books and audiobooks to check out, TV and videos to watch, online learning programs for help with all kinds of learning, free access to newspapers and magazines. It’s truly amazing what libraries are doing right now and I encourage you to check yours out online!  🙂
We have also enjoyed listening to books read on video. The teachers at both of my kids’ schools have been doing this, but also many celebrities have. Josh Gad (Olaf in the Frozen movies) has been reading books and posting the videos on Twitter and YouTube. While I was looking around for other books on video, I found one from years ago read by Betty White. You can watch her read Harry the Dirty Dog here. LeVar Burton–the host of the old show Reading Rainbow–has been reading books live on Twitter, too. And I JUST saw that Sir Patrick Stewart (Star Trek) has been reading a sonnet a day!
I hope these fun links and ideas help you and your family! I’d love to see links to your favorite online-things-to-do during lock down, too!
Have a wonderful week!
The Writing Food Truck Race
If you’ve got some folks at home,
and don’t know just what to do,
just pick up a Shakespeare tome
and give some scenes a sweet read through.
Y’all can play multiple roles
(I have been Lady MacBeth),
and you can soothe your restless souls
and maybe get quite laughed to death
like when the witches, granting pith
said “where the place,
upon the heath,
there to meet with…
(wait now)…MacBEETH!”
That whine you hear’s no carrier wave;
it’s Shakespeare spinning in his grave.
The MacBeeth reference comes from a record made my (I think) The Pointer Sisters, lampooning the Bard. Worth looking around to see if it’s still available; it was a hoot.
Rachel, have you and your kids listened to Hank, the Cowdog books? Hysterical.
Oh, yes!!! The author is reading them aloud right now and he does all his own audiobooks with all the voices and banjo songs!!! So good. One of our favorites is The Chrysanthemum Song: “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, a name you can say when you’re chewing your gum!”
So fun! Strangely enough, my 3 sons are having an even harder time waking up in the morning now that they get to sleep in until 9:00AM. Could be their Dad keeping them up to play boardgames … but I’ve started reading Murder on the Orient Express out loud to them first thing in the morning as they are groaning and begging me to leave, ha! We will have to check out these other resources as well, thank you!