Free Audio Books in Our Homeschool

I'm a Charlotte Mason mama. Our homeschool is a Charlotte Mason-ish homeschool. And if you know anything about Charlotte, you know that means LOTS OF BOOKS! In the early years, it means lots of books that YOU (mama) have to read aloud! And if you try to keep all of your kids in the same subject matter for as many of the subjects as possible, it means that those books have to be read aloud until the very last kid can read well enough to digest the material on her own.

A confession... Most moms won't be scandalized by this, but most Charlotte Mason moms probably will. I HATE reading aloud! For real hatred. Thirty seconds in, I'm yawning, and my eyes are watering, and my larynx is hurting, and my voice is cracking.

Very early on in my Charlotte Mason journey, I realized that I was going to have to find an alternative to reading all those books aloud to my kids. As the kids have grown older, more of them have learned to read well enough that they can begin to shoulder the read-aloud load. But the oldest hates it almost as much as me.

I knew that audio books would be a good fit for us. But have you checked those prices?!? One of the reasons that we decided to homeschool was financial! We can give our kids a quality education for a fraction of the price. But if we had to buy all of our books in audio form, we'd be just as well to pay for private school! (Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration...)

Enter Librivox - my life saver! Librivox is a non-profit project that pairs volunteer readers with public domain books and hosts the audio recordings online. For Free! It's sort of like a Project Gutenberg with voices. Public domain means that the copyright has expired, and that generally means "old." Well, most of my curriculum books fall in this category, so Librivox is a GREAT match for us! Many of our selected books are found there, and we have discovered many that we hadn't planned to read, which have since become favorites.

I download an app on my iPhone. This is the one I use, but there are several available. This allows me to easily download the .mp3 files to my phone. We hook the phone up to the audio input cable in my car, and away we school! We do listen indoors sometimes, but as we have a 20-30 minute commute to all of our activities, this is a great time to get in some of our "reading." The girls enjoy their stories; sometimes it doesn't even feel like school!

The cons:

• The readers are volunteers. Some of them are spectacular. Some of them are terrible. We know several of the terrible ones by name and avoid titles read by them. Thankfully, most often, a terrible reader only does a few chapters in a book, so you can make it through those. One book we read recently had a great reader up until the last 10 or so chapters. The girl who read those last chapters was so awful that we opted to download the book from Gutenberg and read them ourselves. But again - most of them are great. You won't get all the fancy character voices that you'll get with the professionally produced audio books, but the price tag more than makes up for that in my opinion.
• It is possible to overdo recorded books. There is something about snuggling up on the couch to read together. You can miss that with a recorded book. And there is something important about drive time with regard to connecting with kids. If we fill every moment of that time with recorded books, we miss out on some deep conversations with our children. But we do a TON of driving, so there is plenty of time for both in our family!

Happy reading to you!