My family likes going places. We love to visit friends and places. We love giving the boys experiences. I love planning trips. I love being on trips. I hate traveling to trips…with my children. (I dream of traveling on my own. Coffee and magazines. Let that be known.) But as we know, kids ruin err, change everything. Because…you know, harmonicas.
Yet we continue to travel, and we consistantly survive. At one point I did treats and surprises. I doled out small pieces of crap and suckers. It kept them quiet for short periods at a time. But then I had a couple sugared up kids and a car full of crap to deal with. So that needed to change.
Recently I have discovered something that changed everything. EVERY. THING. Podcasts. I am not talking about The Teacher’s Pet, Getting Curious, or My Favorite Murder. We will save those for another blog post. I am talking about KIDS PODCASTS. People. You need these in your life.
There are a million of them! But if you have preschool or early elementary kids – here is the list for you!
- Disney Story Central. These are 8-16 minutes long and spin offs from your favorite Disney movies. Gus chants Buzz Lightyear until we play it. So we play this one first…to eliminate the whole chanting thing.
- Story Nory. The narrarator has the cutest Brittish accent. And the stories are adorbs.
- Story Pirates. This is some silly stuff. Kids write it and kids love it. The sound effects and drama draws my boys right on in.
- Sesame Street. This is seriously just short episodes of Sesame Street. It is available via video – but if you tell my children, I will be super mad at you. And you don’t want me to be super mad at you. I will pretend to be nice to your face and then complain about you to my husband, mom, best friend, and sister-in-law. You don’t want that, do you?
- Stories Podcast. Fun stories with fun voices and sound effects. I am not going to lie…I get into these, too.
- Reading Harry Potter with a Four Year Old. THIS IS OUR OBSESSION. Hank and I are on the third Harry Potter right now. And we take our nightly reading seriously, but on car rides, we crack up with dad and son through this podcast. It is literally a dad reading Harry Potter and his four year old doing commentary.
Now go out into the world and see great places!
Any kiddo podcasts I am missing? Tell me about them!
The Speech Mom 
>
LikeLike
We love Wow in the World!
LikeLike
We will absolutely check this one out! Thank you!
LikeLike
Ha I meant to forward this to my husband instead of reply… BUT THANK YOU for this great resource! Love reading your posts. Jessie Halverson (Liesl’s mom from Gus’s class)
>
LikeLike
I’m so glad I checked in on you. It’s been a while. This is really cute and clever and extremely helpful information and advise. My daughter has a speech therapy practice and a six month old so as a new grandmother I am getting reacquainted with fun stuff to do with kids. And loving it. We spent a lot of time with books on tape and then books on CD as well as reading books aloud in cars and everywhere and telling stories for years and years. This is a great way to continue that practice. OK I’ve got to be honest; we have 22-year-old triplets and our daughter is 29 and we spent a lot of time on our trips watching videos and then DVDs. On our trips I tried to find things that would match up with what we were going to do. One long road trip, the kids were in high school history so we watched not only Gone with the Wind but also Dr. Zhivago. I figured they were trapped and couldn’t do anything about it. It’s a parents prerogative to be the boss that makes parenting fun sometimes..
LikeLike