Why Audio Stories for Kids Starting at Age 3 or 4?

Before my daughter was born I was often a fairly careless consumer of media products. I didn’t watch a ton of TV but I was still prone to surfing the channels and just watching whatever was on. I had a DVD collection but it was a pretty random collection. We had lots of books in the house but they were on odd mix of genres and quality, and included anything from paperback thrillers to the classics.

When our first child was born I started becoming more thoughtful about what media influences I wanted in the house. By the time she was 3 we had great collection of children’s books and I’d purchased a handful of classic story collections as wells as audiobooks, which we liked to listen to in the car or as an alternative to watching TV. Though we did a lot of reading together, we also came to love the audio format because the best audio stories proved to be vastly entertaining and they actually educated me on the story, as well as on how to tell a good story.

For example, we had tried reading Kipling’s Just So Stories without much success. But after hearing a good audio version the stories really came alive. We learned how musical the language really was. After that we both read the stories and listened to the audio version on a regular basis. My own ability to read the stories was vastly improved by having a great example of how to tell the story well.