Chick-fil-A is the fast-food of choice for our girls. Depending on what they get, we can even eek out two meals – dinner then lunch the next day – from their offerings. We believe they’re a little healthier than other places.
With a kids’ meal, you often get a gift. At one time, those gifts were story tapes, dramatized versions of stories about Harriet Tubman and Ben Franklin, among others. The girls loved to listen to them on trips. We liked them, too. Sadly, those tapes got played so much, they just wore out.
The other day, I started trolling the Web to see if I could find those stories in a different format, like an Mp3 that I could load onto an iPod. I started out in iTunes. I didn’t find them, but one book in the iTunes store I did find, “The Drinking Gourd,” was one of Abby’s favorites and caused quite a discussion at home about slavery. I was able to get it for just $1.95.
Then I went into the children’s section of iTunes and found in iTunes U a section from the University of South Florida for Lit2Go, a free online collection of stories and poems. Browsing through them and listening to a few, I found them to be pretty darn good. And Mp3 means you don’t have to have iTunes or an iPod. Any digital player or computer will work. And you can burn them to CD, too.
At the iTunes store, they’re broken down by grade level. Aesop, Beatrix Potter, Frances Hodgson Burnett (“The Secret Garden”), Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf among others are there. On the Web site, you can browse by author, title or reading level. Or just search the database by keyword, too.
You can get “The Drinking Gourd” on iTunes.
