Tip Tuesday: Our Homeschool Secret Weapon-Audiobooks

Our family uses a wide variety of resources in our homeschool. We enjoy different curriculum choices, books, science experiments, math manipulatives, and more. I appreciate all of them, but one of my absolute favorite homeschool resources is audiobooks.
Audiobooks are my secret weapons for making everything happen!

Benefits of Audiobooks in Your Homeschool

While an audiobook does not replace sitting together on the couch and enjoying a good story, it is a great way to increase the amount of time your children hear quality reading. They get all of the benefits of hearing rich vocabulary and engaging stories, and you get to accomplish needed tasks like cooking dinner or working one-on-one with another child.

We love to redeem travel time with audiobooks. When my children listen to the book, there are fewer complaints about being bored and even fewer requests to stop for a snack or bathroom break. The books we listen to turn ride time into educational time through good literature, exciting biographies, and even great history books.

When we listen together, we create a shared family experience and memories. My children are often quoting our favorite books to each other.

For example, you might hear them saying, “Oh Children” in their deep Aslan voice or “My place beside you. My blood for yours. Till the Green Ember rises, or the end of the world!” from the Green Ember.

Finally, audiobooks often help give me a few minutes of quiet in the afternoon and help my younger children get some still quiet time. Once my children are old enough to no longer nap, audiobooks are a great way to keep them calm and quiet for a bit each afternoon. They can lay in bed or hang out on the couch and listen to an audiobook.

Where Do You Get Audiobooks For Your Homeschool?

You might think that this sounds great, but you do not know how to get started or find good audiobooks.
When we started listening to audiobooks, we were buying books on CD, and we would listen using the CD players in the car or the children’s rooms.

This is still an option if you use CD players, but we have found that as technology has progressed, it has become easier to use digital audiobooks.
Digital audiobooks are easy to find, do not take up space, and they don’t’ get scratched like our books on CD.
Our family primarily uses Audible and Overdrive for audiobooks. We have a subscription to audible that gives us a credit every other month for a new audiobook and a discount on any additional books that we purchase.

These books are great for road trips because we can download them onto our phones or Kindle and listen in the car without using data. We also own these once we purchase them so the children can listen to favorites repeatedly.

Another benefit to audible is that Amazon has made it very easy for me to give them access to the audiobooks on the Kindles and allow unlimited listening time while still limiting other apps and programs.
Overdrive is fantastic because it is free with our library cards.

There are a variety of audiobooks (and e-books) available, and you can borrow them for a set amount of time, and then they automatically return. The selection varies from library to library, but we have found many great choices. My son is fond of listening to the Boxcar Children series using Overdrive.

Other Audiobooks Resources

Heirloom Audio: For The Temple (Review)

Read Aloud Family

Reading With Your Ears

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Resource Library

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