Today's post is sponsored by Heirloom Audio. I love it when I find things I can add to our homeschool to make it both more interesting and more fun and help to get my children (boys especially) excited about learning.
If you have an auditory learner, a reluctant reader, or a student who does not enjoy the subject of history, you don't want to skip over today's post:
5 Reasons to Include Audios in Your Homeschool Curriculum
1. Audio Adventures are no Respecter of Persons
For late, reluctant or poor readers, audio adventures still allow them to travel the world through books, learning the information and the stories necessary to their own development, enjoyment and the completion of their course work.
They also make history and fiction come alive to those who are normally bored by reading about the past (see #4).
2. Audios are a Great Tool for Teaching Good Listening
Listening to audio books or stories trains the ear to listen, and the mind to focus. Need a child to increase his ability to focus? Start employing the use of audios more often.
3. Stories Help our Brains Process Better
Story structure encourages our brains to think in sequence, expanding our attention spans:
Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and that’s a good thing for your brain. With this structure, our brains are encouraged to think in sequence, linking cause and effect. The more you read, the more your brain is able to adapt to this line of thinking.
4. Audio Stories Improve the Listener’s Imagination Skills
When you hear the story read, you can see it in your head, and the sound effects make it even more real. I can remember reading a book and then later being disappointed that the movie was not as good as the visuals I’d imagined when reading.
Rodero, a communications professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona says this:
Audio is one of the most intimate forms of media because you are constantly building your own images of the story in your mind and you’re creating your own production…. Listening, unlike looking at a written page, is more active, since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.
5. Shared Audio Adventures Strengthen Family Bonds
Listening to a story and the brain creating the images to “see the story” in your imagination make it almost as real as living through it yourself. When we have a read aloud time as a family or listen to audio adventures together, and discuss those adventures with each other, we are creating memories together, “living through” the story together. Those shared adventures and memories strengthen our bond as a family.
Heirloom Audio Adventures
We have recently been introduced to the G.A. Henty Audio Adventure stories created by Bill Heid and several former producers of the Adventures in Odyssey series. We love them! Not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because they are exciting, extremely well done, and convey the important lessons of faith, integrity, commitment and the other values that we want our children to learn.
Heirloom Audio Adventures wants children to be excited about learning history because of what it conveys to us about who God is and what he's done in the past, which in turn gives us hope for the future. Currently offering 5 of the G.A. Henty dramatized stories in both CD and digital download format, more stories are in the works, and we can't wait!
Special Offer
Heirloom Audios has a special offer for Paradise Praises readers! Use the code PPC1 to get 67% off your order by August 17, 2016! Click on through any of the following images to visit them and purchase yours today!
Phyllis Sather says
We have these and listened to them as a family when traveling – and our children are young adults. We all enjoy the quality and the learning.
David Cortes says
Why I should win this…
My oldest boy, Nemi, has just started School, in Spanish. So my wife and I are purposely looking for way for him to be exposed to more English so his vocab, comprehension and pronunciation of the English language do not diminish. I know an audiobook like this one will help a lot…. specially since it is about way and what boy does not like war stories?
Danielle says
Thanks for this!
I am in my first year of homeschooling and I have never given audios a thought. I didn’t think at five our son would stay interested in a book without pictures but we’re on book 2 by Laura Ingalls. I bet he’d listen to audios and I might give them a try. We are going to be traveling from PA to Montana in May, audios would be great for that trip.
Katie Hornor says
Danielle, our kids thrive with audios. It takes a bit to get them calmed down and doing quiet activities as they listen sometimes, but they love them.