Prying your child's fingers from their tablet can be frustrating, but there is an alternative to passive screen time – human-read audiobooks. When you become a new member of Learning Ally, you can download engaging age-appropriate audiobooks for your child to listen and learn with their eyes, ears, and minds.
Build Fundamental Reading Skills
Reading with audiobooks spark interests, build memory mass, and prepare children to learn these fundamental reading skills:
- Improving listening skills and two-way engagement
- Strengthening comprehension skills by paying mindfulness and context
- Boosting vocabulary and phonics
- Building background knowledge
- Learning English
Heightening imagination and visualization skills
A study by The National Institutes of Health in 2018 found that children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests. Some children staring at a screen for more than seven hours a day experienced thinning of the brain's cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning. This study, and similar findings, give us pause, especially in the pandemic when we are cooped up and looking for alternatives.
Audiobooks Are The Educational Answer to Passive Screen Time
Audiobooks are especially beneficial for children who are emergent and reluctant readers, and those with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia. You can pause and discuss a story, identify vocabulary words and their definitions, reward your child for learning novel words and answering comprehension questions. You can act out scenes and character roles, an activity your whole family will enjoy. In this article, we offer five award-winning books for the purpose of exciting children to read.
Dr. Jennifer F. Cross, attending pediatrician and a developmental and behavioral pediatrics expert at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, says, “If young children spend most of their time engaging with an iPad, smartphone, or television, it can be hard to get them engaged in other activities to foster imagination and creativity, like exploring outdoors, and playing with other children to develop social skills. Children who watch a lot of television during the early years perform less well on reading tests and may show deficits in attention.”
Learning Ally audiobooks can enrich reading engagement. They are unique in that subject experts, skilled voice artists, and volunteers narrate the stories to make them come to life, versus the drone of a computerized voice. You might be interested to know that when a child reads for twenty minutes a day or twenty or more times with consistency, it is proven that they will develop a pattern of reading frequency likely to increase their reading level.
Eligible members of Learning Ally can browse the audiobook library by grade, Lexile Level, subject, topic, category, or curriculum and access more than 80,000 "human-narrated" audiobooks that children need for school and can read for pleasure. Find culturally-relevant titles that enrich your child's own identity.
New members use code HOME99 and receive $36 off your first year of membership.
There is no time like the present to become a member and introduce your child to the world of audiobooks to open their eyes, ears, and minds to the wonderful world of reading.