Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

audiobooks

Classic Audiobook Resource Pack for children in Kindergarten and Year 1

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For parents who are struggling to find the time or energy to read with their kids regularly, we recommend audiobooks.

We are pleased to present our classic audiobook resource pack for children in Kindergarten and Year 1 – 36 free audiobook links curated by our speech pathologists to give preschoolers exposure to enriched vocabulary, complex sentence structures, “story grammar” and important background knowledge of the world, including cultural references many of us take for granted. Also includes practical comprehension and inferencing tips.

Stimulate language development by listening to audiobooks of classic stories at home, preschool, or in the car.

Thanks to our fantastic speech pathologist, Sasha Sugita, for compiling the resource.

Sign up below to receive your free copy:

For more audiobooks, check out our free classic audiobook resource pack for preschoolers.

To read more about the stories featured, see our longer article here.

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Classic Audiobook Resource Pack for Preschoolers

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It’s hard to find time to read storybooks every day.

This is especially true for parents who are working long hours or shifts, and parents who may have language, reading or other communication challenges. For parents who are struggling to find the time or energy to read with their kids regularly, we recommend audiobooks.

We are pleased to present our classic audiobook resource pack for preschoolers – 20 free audiobook links curated by our speech pathologists to give preschoolers exposure to enriched vocabulary, complex sentence structures, “story grammar” and important background knowledge of the world, including cultural references many of us take for granted. Also includes practical comprehension and inferencing tips.

Stimulate language development by listening to audiobooks of classic stories at home, preschool, or in the car.

Thanks to our amazing speech pathologist, Sasha Sugita, for compiling the resource.

Sign up below to receive your free copy:

To read more about the stories featured, see our longer article here.

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Getting ready to read at big school: a free guide for families with preschoolers

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Too many preschoolers start school without the speech and pre-reading skills needed to thrive in Kindergarten. But which skills matter the most?

In this free guide, we seek to answer this question by summarising the evidence in Plain English.

Getting ready to read at big school

We cover:

  • typical speech development, consonant acquisition milestones, and error patterns;
  • the links between unclear speech and later reading difficulties;
  • foundational pre-reading skills (like phonological awareness and print awareness);
  • how to teach the alphabet to your child;
  • how to teach children to read;
  • the benefits of shared reading and audiobooks; and
  • school readiness communication skills.  

This family guide focuses on helping preschoolers to get ready to read at big school.

Well-developed language skills – listening and talking skills – are also vital for school readiness. You can read more about how to help your preschooler’s oral language development in our free developmental language guide for families. It contains lots of practical strategies and tips about the importance of play, language stimulation techniques. 

We hope you find these resources helpful.

Download it below.

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

20 free audiobooks for preschoolers – plus a hot tip about making your own

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We love it when parents read storybooks with their preschoolers everyday. But sometimes, for logistics or other reasons, it can be hard to find the time – especially for parents who are working long hours or shifts (and often commuting long distances), and parents who may have reading or other communication challenges themselves.

For parents who are struggling to find the time or energy to read with their kids regularly, we recommend audiobooks. While they lack the interaction you get from shared “live” book-reading, audiobooks can be the next best thing, e.g. when a parent is driving or away at work. 

Here are two ideas (and 20 free resources) to help you get started:

1. Free Classic tales

Listening to audiobooks of classic stories – at home, or just as background sounds in the car – can help. It gives preschoolers exposure to enriched vocabulary, complex sentence structures, “story grammar” and important background knowledge of the world, including cultural references many of us take for granted.

Here are 20 of my favourites, each with a YouTube link for immediate, free access. Thanks again to CoreKnowledge for its suggestions, supplemented by some of our favourites:

Story
The Three Little Pigs
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
The Gingerbread Boy
The Shoemaker and the Elves
Thumbelina
Little Red Hen
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
The Lion and the Mouse
Jack and the Beanstalk
Cinderella
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Snow White and Rose Red
Rapunzel
Tom Thumb
The Princess and the Frog
Little Red Riding Hood
Rumpelstiltskin
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Hansel and Gretel

If your preschoolers likes these, check out our free audiobooks for Kindergarten and Year 1 kids.

2. Do it yourself audiobooks!

A few years ago, I stumbled on “The Read-Aloud Handbook” by Jim Trelease. It’s a fantastic resource, which gave me the idea of making my own audiobooks. Thanks to new technology, it’s never been easier to do it. 

Does your child have a favourite story – one they like to listen to over and over? If so, simply grab your smart phone, find the voice recording app (or, even better, the video function), and record yourself reading it. Email it to yourself and – just like that – you have an audiobook ready to share with your kids any time, anywhere. 

Another great thing about DIY audiobooks: you can make them for kids (or adults) of any age. For example, here’s one I made for my (now) teenager a few years ago. I made it on Garageband, on an old iMac, but I could just as easily have done it with my phone these days. 

The Three Sneezes

Just don’t play this one to your preschooler – it’s a bit scary!

If you take us up on our tip and decide to make your own audiobook, we’d love to hear about it. 

Good luck!

Principal source: Trelease, J. (1995). The Read-Aloud Handbook, Penguin Books, NY, NY.

Related articles:

Image: https://tinyurl.com/y4anhynb

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

41 more FREE Audiobooks for children: this time, for students in Years 2 to 6

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We’ve had such a positive response to our list of free, quality audiobooks for kids in Kindergarten and Year 1. So we thought: “Why not finish the job?”

For school-aged kids with reading difficulties like dyslexia, audiobooks can play a big, positive role, in ensuring students continue to be exposed to quality, age-appropriate literature – even if they have difficulty reading them in written form. For students with dyslexia and other decoding difficulties, audiobooks can help mitigate the “Matthew Effect” – where good readers get better at understanding higher level language and reading by reading more, and poor readers fall further behind in reading and higher level language skills because they read less often. 

Audiobooks can also be helpful for children with developmental language disorder (DLD).  Students with DLD can listen to stories (or parts of stories) several times to help them to understand complex syntax and new vocabulary used in books that are often not found in conversational speech. 

Enough, already! Just give us the book links!

Fair enough! Without further ado, here are 41 of our favourite audiobooks – all with accessible YouTube links.

As with our list for Kindergarten and Year 1 kids, we’ve selected books recommended in the Core Knowledge English Curriculum, a free, knowledge-based curriculum. You’ll note that some of the choices are rather advanced, especially for Year 5 and Year 6 students. We say give them a go anyway! You can always step down a level if you need to, and there is some evidence that setting high expectations for kids around literacy, reading and scholarship can help them to develop a habit of reading. 

YearStory and YouTube link
2Beauty and the Beast
 The Blind Man and the Elephant (Traditional)
 A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
 Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
 The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen)
 The Fisherman and his Wife (Brothers Grimm)
 How the Camel Got His Hump (Kipling)
 The Magic Paintbrush (Chinese Traditional)
 Peter Pan (James M. Barrie)
 The Tongue-Cut Sparrow (Japan)
 The Tiger, the Brahman, and Jackal
  
 3Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
 Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (Arabian Nights)
 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Arabian Nights)
 The Hunting of the Great Bear/ The Never Ending Bear Hunt (Native American)
 The Husband Who was to Mind the House (Gone is Gone)
 The Little Match Girl (Hans Christian Andersen)
 The People Could Fly (African American tale)
 William Tell
 Wind in the Willows excerpts (Kenneth Grahame) – The River Bank and The Open Road
   
4The Fire on the Mountain (Ethiopia)
 Gulliver in Lilliput and Brobdingnag (Swift)
 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving)
 Rip Van Winkle (Irving)
 The Magical Brocade (Chinese)
 Pollyanna (Porter)
 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
 Robin Hood
 St. George and the Dragon
 Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
   
5The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain)
 Little Women (Alcott)
 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
 The Secret Garden (Burnett)
 Tales of Sherlock Holmes, including the Red-Headed League (Doyle)
 Don Quixote (Cervantes)
 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
  
 6The Odyssey (younger readers)
 The Iliad (younger readers)
 The Prince and the Pauper (Twain)
 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)

Related articles:

Image: https://tinyurl.com/y4tzy3r7

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

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