Read Aloud Gold Mine

Instead of merely listing all of the books that Lauren has been listening to this week, I'll share the exciting treasure that I found last weekend.

It's fairly common for Lauren to think of a book title and ask me to put it on hold at the library for her. Last Saturday morning, she asked me to find the audiobooks for the American Girl Julie series. They were one of her favorites from our library in Arkansas. When I looked for them at our new library, I was disappointed to see that they weren't available in CD form, just as electronic resources.

I clicked through to find out more about the audiobooks, expecting to be taken to the Overdrive website. I've used Overdrive in the past, but primarily to find ebooks for myself.

Instead of going to Overdrive, the library website took me to the other electronic resource provider that we have access to -- OneClick. According to our library website, OneClick has many favorite audiobooks as well as some that are only available on OneClick. Better yet, most of these books are always available, meaning that I wouldn't have to deal with placing (and waiting for) an electronic reserve.

It took me a few minutes to install and figure out how to use the software to download the Julie audiobooks for Lauren. She was thrilled when I told her that the entire book series was now on her (hand-me-down) iPod and that she could plug it into the CD player in her room. She later decided that it was really awesome that Tim and I had switched cars for the day. Tim's car has an iPod hook-up to the stereo.

I later went back to the OneClick website to see what else I could find. It turns out that they have audio versions of nearly all of the American Girl books. I didn't know it was even possible to get audio versions of them; they've never been published as CD versions. I know Lauren will be ecstatic to find out that she could hear her favorite Molly stories without waiting for me to read them aloud to her. I'm keeping it a secret for a while longer; I'm sure we'll have an occasion before too long when a new (and already loved) audiobook series will be much appreciated.

I told my friend Debra at Footprints in the Butter that I'd be sharing about these books so that she can introduce them to her daughter. Lauren has loved the American Girl books for quite some time now, but the lengthy chapters sometimes make it difficult for me to read them aloud to her. All of the American Girl books provide a generous helping of historical background along with the fun stories about the characters. It's not necessarily history study in terms of dates and historical figures, rather the books tell the stories of what life was really like in that particular time period. Lauren's favorite character, Molly, lives during World War II and talks about her dad going to England to help in the war, a British girl coming to stay with them, vegetables from their Victory Garden, and more. I'm still a bit surprised that the Julie books, set in 1974, are part of the historical books. It is fun to hear of Julie reading the same books I read, playing the same games, and even talking about some of the same political issues.

I'm linking this post up to Debra's weekly Read-Aloud challenge. Feel free to stop by and share what you've been reading or listening to lately.