January Blog Contest Winner

Congratulations to the January blog contest winner, Kurt Johnson! If you haven’t yet, be sure to go back and read his comment, about a weekend where he and his son enjoyed Washington D.C. institution Ben’s Chili Bowl and got a civil rights lesson along with their half-smokes.

We didn’t have our usual number of entries last month—we hope it’s because you’re still recovering from the holidays! We’re taking some time off from the blog contest this month because we’re working on the 2010 annual catalog. Stay tuned to the blog and the twitter feed for sneak peeks and updates on when to expect yours in the mail.

Katherine Paterson: “Read out loud!”

After reading the New York Times piece “New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children—Read More” this morning, I was glad to see that the newly named and soon-to-be-crowned National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Katherine Paterson encourages parents to read aloud to their children.

Long-touted as a tool for reading readiness, reading aloud to children at least three times a week has been shown to help children identify letter-sound relationships, have sight-word recognition, and understand words in context (Denton and West, 2002). The 1985 Report of the Commission on Reading, Becoming a Nation of Readers, states that, “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.” But reading aloud is also a great tool for older students. SLJ has lauded it as a way to get teens hooked on books: “students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves—increasing the likelihood that they will one day become independent, lifelong readers.” And Education World reminds us that “since children listen on a higher level than they read, listening to other readers stimulates growth and understanding of vocabulary and language patterns. “

Audiobooks are a great partner for read alouds. While teacher and parent read alouds are valuable, audiobooks offer kids the chance to read aloud independently, following along with the text while listening to a professional narrator read aloud to them. With independent listening to audiobooks, students are also given the power to stop, start, and relisten as necessary. Whole-class audiobook read alouds offer the same benefits as a teacher read aloud, but allow you, the teacher, to walk around the classroom, monitor understanding, and give individual attention to students who may need it.

We applaud Katherine Paterson for bringing reading aloud to the forefront of her campaign, and we hope that she spreads the word that read alouds aren’t just for beginning readers—they’re for everyone!

For more information on how reading aloud and using audiobooks can improve literacy, check out our Teacher Resources tab on the website or request a Recorded Books Work! research guide.

Do you use audiobooks for read alouds in your classroom? Tell us how and why!

Also, check out our FREE lesson plans and audio for Bridge to Terabithia – Part 1 and Part 2.

Send us your audiobook tips and you could be featured!

First of all, don’t forget to enter our January contest to win a free audiobook! We’re currently hard at work on the 2010 Recorded Books K-12 catalog, and we love including stories and testimonials from our customers. If you use audiobooks in your classroom or school, send us a quick statement telling us what you think of them. We don’t need anything too fancy—just jot down your experiences with audiobooks and send them our way via email, blog comment, or twitter.

Some ideas:
1. Share a story about a particular student who has shown improvement since being introduced to audiobooks.
2. Tell us about a teacher/librarian audiobook partnership or intervention program that uses audiobooks.
3. Share your favorite lesson plan using audiobooks.
4. Tell us why you and your students like audiobooks.
5. Tell us what your favorite RB audiobook is.
6. Tell us how you use audiobooks in your classroom.
7. Tell us how you found out about using audiobooks to improve fluency, comprehension, and motivation.

Be sure we can contact you via twitter or email if we choose your story or quote!

P.S.—We appreciate you sharing with us, so if you are featured in the catalog, we’ll provide you with a freebie or two!

Katherine Paterson Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature

Hans Christian Andersen Medal and Newbery Award-winning author Katherine Paterson has been named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, replacing previous ambassador Jon Scieszka. Paterson has chosen “Read for Life” as her platform and will serve a two-year term as ambassador.

Recorded Books is proud to offer 12 of Paterson’s works on audiobook, including Newbery Medal winner Bridge to Terabithia. Also be sure to check out our free lesson plans (both part 1 and part 2) and audiobook excerpts for the book.

January Blog Contest

After taking a month off, we’re back to start off 2010 with a blog contest! We perused the list of holidays celebrated in January. So many good options! Should we celebrate Peculiar People Day (January 10)? Penguin Awareness Day (January 20)? Squirrel Appreciation Day (January 21)? National Corn Chip Day (January 29)? It was a tough call, but in the end we decided to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (January 18, 2010).

To celebrate King’s message of peace and nonviolent activism, we’re giving away an audiobook about another, earlier peaceful protester, Rosa Parks. I Am Rosa Parks, written by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, is a great introduction for your readers to Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. For more titles about Civil Rights leaders, see last year’s list for Black History Month.

Download the I Am Rosa Parks RB Teacher Guide for free!

To enter the contest, just leave a comment on this post below telling us how you teach your students about the Civil Rights movement or who the Civil Rights leader you most admire is.

CONTEST RULES:

* Leave a comment below (be sure to enter a valid email address, or we won’t be able to contact you if you win!) sharing a story about someone who inspired you and how they inspired you or why they were such an inspiration.
* Tweet (we’re @recordedbooks) or blog about the contest and you can leave a second comment linking to your tweet or post—you’ll get another contest entry. Spread the word!
* Again, be sure you leave a valid email address with your comment so we can contact you. If you’re picked as a winner and we can’t contact you, the prize will got to the next winner. (You don’t need to re-nter your address within the body of the comment, though. Just be sure it’s in the form when you leave your comment.)
* Comments will be assigned a number (first commenter is #1, second is #2, etc). Winners will be picked by random.org according to comment number.
* Drawing will be held on January 29, 2010 at 12:00PM Eastern time. Winners will be contacted by email to get mailing information. The winner will receive one copy the following title on CD: I Am Rosa Parks

CONTEST CLOSED! Not a lot of entries this month! Spread the word so we can get the contest going again. The winner of the January contest is Kurt Johnson – congratulations!

Happy Holidays!

We hope you’re all enjoying a much-deserved break from the classroom for a while. Here are a few links to check out while you’re lounging on the couch drinking hot cocoa (or frantically working on lesson plans for January!).

• Help Santa stuff teachers’ stockings with audiobooks and get a free download in our holiday game from last year.
• Check out our lesson plans and audio excerpts for Strider, written by teacher Laurie Stone. (This links to Part 2 – click the link in that post to get to Part 1 of the lessons).
• Free lesson plans and audio for Bridge to Terabithia. Part 1 and Part 2
• A coworker tipped me off to this one. A Christmas Carol, as shortened by Dickens himself for an 1868 reading. (We also offer the complete, unabridged audio narrated by audiobook legend Frank Muller.)
• Check out the Alan Sitomer BookJam! Join in the discussion with Alan himself at the BookJam Ning, check out the main website at http://www.thebookjam.com, or take the BookJam Tour.
• Check out the extensive resources section at the BookJam website. It might just get the wheels turning for some exciting January plans!
• Are you a fan of Janet Allen? Check out the Plugged-in blog for Dr. Janet Allen’s Plugged-in to Reading.
• Join other educators at the Plugged-in Educators’ Ning and get the latest info on the Plugged-in Workshop—dates recently announced!
• Check out some public domain audiobooks at Librivox. These are audio recordings done by amateur volunteers of public domain texts. Lots of cool archaic stuff to be had, plus all the public domain classics.
• Follow us on twitter! Recorded Books K-12, Plugged-in, and The BookJam are all on twitter. Follow, say hello, and I promise to return the favor. You’ll get advance notice of any freebies we offer or contests we have, plus audiobook and education news and an inside track to RB!

$50 Off FETC Registration from RB!

Recorded Books and FETC are offering a $50 FETC VIP Attendee Coupon. Download the full coupon flyer here or by clicking the banner above. Registration ends this Friday, 12/18/2009, so register now! Just enter priority code FL5010 during registration checkout. And don’t forget to come visit Recorded Books at the event: BOOTH #251.

From FETC:

FETC (Florida Educational Technology Corporation), a division of 1105 Media Inc., is one of the largest, most successful conferences in the United States devoted to educational technology. The conference program is designed so educators and administrators have an opportunity to learn how to integrate different technologies across the curriculum–from kindergarten to college–while being exposed to the latest hardware, software and successful strategies on student technology use. FETC is designed for teachers, principals and deans, district administrators, curriculum designers, media specialists, technology directors and various other educators.

AudioFile’s Best of 2009

AudioFile Magazine recently released its list of the Best Audiobooks of 2009, and we’re thrilled to have 5 titles on the list (one of which is by Neil Gaiman, who seems to be dominating our blog news lately!). AudioFile says these recordings are “the titles that got the buzz (and deserved it), the favorites we couldn’t stop listening to and talking about–and passed along to friend after friend.”

THE LANGUAGE OF BEES Laurie R. King
Read by Jenny Sterlin (Recorded Books)

WICKED PREY John Sandford
Read by Richard Ferrone (Penguin Audio/Recorded Books)

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Read by Avery Brooks, Marcus Garvey, Maya Angelou, Samuel L. Jackson, et al. (Recorded Books/Griot Audio)

GOOD OMENS Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
Read by Martin Jarvis (Harper Audio/Recorded Books)

What are your favorite audiobooks of the year?

Gaiman Collaborates with Twitter for an Audiobook First

[UPDATE 2009/12/23: View a video of Katherine Kellgren narrating the audiobook.] Continuing with the Gaiman news, beginning at noon on Tuesday, October 13, BBC Audiobooks America started an intriguing experiment: Creating a book and audiobook via twitter. It started with one tweet and 140 characters from Neil Gaiman:

@neilhimself: Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, “We don’t love you anymore.”

From there, followers of the hashtag on twitter could read along and contribute their own 140 character sentences to the story. What emerged was a story about a young girl who made a deal with the dark side to save a loved one, and who is thrown into a world she doesn’t understand to try and right her mistake. The work, titled (via an online vote) Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry, was turned into an audiobook narrated by frequent Recorded Books narrator Katherine Kellgren and is now available for download.

The work is the first of its kind and definitely worth a listen. It’s very interesting to see the direction the work took. Though Gaiman’s first sentence could have led in multiple directions, the story clearly uses tropes from fantasy and fairy tale genres. It would be interesting to try this experiment again to see other directions the multiple authors could lead the story into.

This is also an experiment that you could easily do in your classroom. Though many of you may have already done group writing projects, writing in such short segments and then recording the audio afterward adds another dimension—writers would have to pay closer attention to flow, voice, tone, and how their phrasing will sound when read aloud. If anyone takes up this project in their classroom, let us know—we’d love to hear the results!

Download from BBC Audiobooks America here.
Download via iTunes podcast here.

Neil Gaiman on Audiobooks

Award-winning author and audiobook narrator Neil Gaiman has long been a champion of the audiobook format. In a recent piece for All Things Considered on NPR News, Neil discusses the audiobook. He plays an excerpt from the earliest audiobook he knows of—Walt Whitman reading his poem America, which you may recognize from a current Levi’s commercial.

An audiobook lover as a child, he rediscovered audiobooks as a parent to supplement his own reading aloud. He was excited when he was allowed to record one of his own books on audio, but was warned it was a dying format because of the impending death of cassettes. Thankfully, that’s not the case!

Read (or listen to!) the interview to learn Gaiman’s thoughts on audio. Also hear him interview author David Sedaris and actor Martin Jarvis on audiobooks, and hear one audiobook director’s woes about “stomach noises” during narration. Be sure to listen to Martin Jarvis’s amusing story about the first audiobook he was hired to record, plus learn how he uses the author’s words to create character’s voices.

Join in the discussion or share your thoughts here on the oft-heard discussion point about audiobooks. Are they the same as books? Critic Harold Bloom writes them off. One commenter points out that a play—whether in print, performed live, or viewed on video—is still a play, so an audiobook is no different. What do you think?