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Here’s a little present for you – the recording I made last year of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.

http://www.archive.org/download/KayrayReadsToYou/childs_christmas.mp3

I have finally updated my podcast feeds! Took a little hiatus, there. Rough summer.

Anyway, I’ve added “Stories of Great Composers for Children” to the “Kara’s Free Audiobooks” podcast:

Basic feed: http://kayray.org/audiobooks/podcast.xml
iTunes link: itpc://kayray.org/audiobooks/podcast.xml

Or if you can’t wait and want the whole audio book now:
http://librivox.org/stories-of-great-composers-for-children-by-thomas-tapper/

And the “Kayray Reads to You” podcast is still working on “By The Great Horn Spoon”:

Basic feed: http://kayray.org/audiobooks/kayray_reads.xml
iTunes link: itpc://kayray.org/audiobooks/kayray_reads.xml

Or get the whole audio book and many others here:
http://www.archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou

Enjoy!

Forgot to mention that I finished recording another free audiobook. Thanks to Elli for prooflistening and cataloging! :)

The Girl on the Boat, by P.G Wodehouse

Also published as “Three Men and a Maid”. The maid of the title is red-haired, dog-loving Wilhelmina “Billie” Bennet, and the three men are Bream Mortimer, a long-time friend and admirer of Billie, Eustace Hignett, a lily-livered poet who is engaged to Billie at the opening of the tale, and Sam Marlowe, Eustace’s dashing cousin, who falls for Billie at first sight. All four find themselves on an ocean liner headed for England together, along with a capable young woman called Jane Hubbard who is smitten with Eustace, and typically Wodehousian romantic shenanigans ensue.

Hope you like it!

Although in general I’ve been feeling better lately, I still haven’t really felt up to doing much recording. I was scrolling through iTunes one day and realized I have a large number of old recordings, from when Henry was little, that I might as well share with you. I’ve just uploaded my recording of “By The Great Horn Spoon!” by Sid Fleischman.

You can download it from my archive.org page:
http://www.archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou,
or from my “Kayray Reads to You” page here at my blog:
http://kayray.org/kayray-reads/

Blurb from Amazon:

Brimming with riveting adventure, the story is set during the Gold Rush. The fast-moving plot follows the high spirited young Jack and his aunt’s faithful butler, Praiseworthy, as they set out to strike it rich in order to support the financially strapped and beloved Aunt Arabella.

It’s a lot better than that description makes it sound, I promise :) If you like it, please buy a real paper copy!

I’ve wanted to record myself reading a few picture books for a long time now, and since today is Elli’s birthday, and she loves my recordings, I asked Dan for help last night. He set up a tripod and pointed my lovely Olympus PEN E-P2 camera over my shoulder, and made sure everything looked and sounded good. And afterward he even converted the video to a reasonably-sized format that would look good on Elli’s iPad. I’ve just put it up on youtube in case anyone else wants to hear the story too. Happy birthday, Elli! :)

The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper:

I read this book 4,728,759,276 times to Henry when he was little, and of course my mom read it to me. I love the illustrations, especially the cheerful food. I don’t know if you can see the illustrations clearly enough, but all the food has happy faces, and the milk bottles are marching along while the spinach dances. I also love it that a jack-knife is included in the list of toys.

Chug chug chug. Puff puff puff!

A couple of weeks ago, Elli found a cute little picture-book biography of J.S. Bach on Project Gutenberg. She showed it to me, and then we noticed that the same author, Thomas Tapper, had written a number of these little biographies, and that Gutenberg has ten of them. So I made them into a collection and recorded them all. Elli did the administrative stuff and the proof-listening. And here they are!

http://librivox.org/stories-of-great-composers-for-children-by-thomas-tapper/

There are links on that catalog page to each little book online, so you can look at the pictures while you listen :)

If you find an online source for any of the other little composer biographies, let me know. I think there around ten more that Gutenberg doesn’t have yet, and I’d be delighted to do a second volume.

More Grammar-Land! Sorry, I forgot to update this since November, but this post will catch you up with the podcast feed and we’ll all be in the same place again.

01 Mr. Noun – 00:10:47
02 Little Article – 00:06:56
03 Mr. Pronoun – 00:11:18
04 Serjeant Parsing’s Visit to Schoolroom-shire
05 Mr. Adjective – 00:10:03
06 Mr. Adjective Tried for Stealing – 00:11:24

Oops :) Forgot! Here’s all the rest of The Apple Stone. Hope you like it!

58 The Apple Stone, Ch. 8: The Muddled Image
59 The Apple Stone, Ch. 9: Stupid as Stone?
60 The Apple Stone, Ch. 10: Big Game
61 The Apple Stone, Ch. 11: Sheep May Safely Graze
62 The Apple Stone, Ch. 12: The Monster

Next up is “The Four-Story Mistake” by Elizabeth Enright.

At least, I hope it’s a treat :)

Here is my recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”:
A Child’s Christmas in Wales

This little story is a Christmas tradition in my family. I remember my big sister reading it aloud to me when I was very small, and I remember my parents reading it to us little ones, and then I remember reading it to them when I was bigger. A bit of info from wikipedia:

A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a prose work by the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas. Originally emerging from a piece written for radio, the poem was recorded by Thomas in 1952. The story is an anecdotal retelling of a Christmas from the view of a young child and is a romanticised version of Christmas’ past, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time.

If you like it, may I suggest that you buy a recording of Dylan Thomas reading it himself? It’s on iTunes (though iTunes won’t sell you the single track; you must buy a whole album of Thomas’s poetry for $6) and here is the single track on Amazon for only $.89!
http://www.amazon.com/A-Childs-Christmas-In-Wales/dp/B00491RONM/ It’s a wonderful recording. It’s a permanent part of my “Best Christmas” playlist.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you get plenty of Useless Presents. Go ahead and lace your tea with rum; it’s only once a year.

P.S. I worry that the joke of “Snakes and Families” and “Happy Ladders” is lost on Today’s Youth… The real games were called “Snakes and Ladders” (you might know it as “Chutes and Ladders”) and “Happy Families“. Now you know.

The next book in the “Kara’s Free Audiobooks” podcast is a wonderful little thing called “Grammar-Land”:

In this charming 1877 book of grammar instruction for children, we are introduced to the nine parts of speech and learn about the rules that govern them in Grammar-Land.

Judge Grammar is far mightier than any Fairy Queen, for he rules over real kings and queens down here in Matter-of-fact-land. Our kings and queens have all to obey Judge Grammar’s laws, or else they would talk what is called bad grammar; and then, even their own subjects would laugh at them, and would say: “Poor things!

They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.

Here is the Preface and Introduction:
00 Preface and Introduction

And here is the rest of This Country of Ours, part 3:

31 The Hunt for the Regicides
32 King Philip’s War
33 How the Charter of Connecticut was Saved
34 The Witches of Salem

Elli and I just recorded an adorable little picture book together: My Very First Little German Book. The text is here: http://www.read.gov/books/german.html and the free librivox audiobook is here: http://librivox.org/my-very-first-little-german-book-by-anonymous/. I read the English parts and Elli read the German parts. I edited the whole thing together, and she did the cataloging. So much fun! Here’s a sample page:

Poor little boy!

A few weeks ago, one of the moms on my homeschool email list asked if anyone could find an online text of “Grammar-Land” by M.L. Nesbitt (published in 1877). I had a look and found the text on Google Books: http://books.google.com/, and after I’d glanced through it I decided I had to read it for LibriVox, since, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with grammar and language, and it looked like a really fun little book.

Elli did the proof-listening for me. We both loved the book. It’s utterly charming, and so lively and interesting! The chapters are nice and short, which didn’t hurt either. It’s a lot easier to find time to record a 10-minute chapter than a 45-minute one.

I finished up the book on Wednesday, so here it is:
http://librivox.org/grammar-land-by-m-l-nesbitt/

“They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.”

Whom do you like best? Elli and I are both quite fond of Dr. Verb, and we dislike the smooth and slimy Adverb. Notice how the author has each character use his own kind of word as much as possible — very clever. :)

It seems I started posting Through the Looking-Glass before This Country of Ours Part 3 was quite finished. Oops :) So now I’ll start posting the rest:

29 The Founding of Connecticut and War with the Indians
30 The Founding of New Haven

Happy November! Here are a few more chapters of The Apple Stone for you:

55 The Apple Stone, Ch 5: The Sword and The Planets
56 The Apple Stone, Ch. 6: The Feathered Serpent
57 The Apple Stone, Ch. 7: Detectives

“The Sword and the Planets” might be my favorite chapter… well, one of my favorites, anyway. I love Sir Amias.

The Apple Stone, by Nicholas Stuart Gray, is very special to me. My sister and I discovered it in the library when we were little, and just devoured it. It is out of print, but I managed to find a nice ex-library hardback on Amazon to read from, since there is not one single copy in the entire San Diego Library system. Grr. It’s a forgotten treasure.

It takes place in England, and there are some elements I definitely didn’t understand when I was little, especially the way the narrator refers to his two Scottish cousins (a MacDonald and a Campbell) as “The Clans”, and why “The Forbidden Word” was so very forbidden. That was the olden days and we didn’t have Google…

This is not a typical “magic adventure” story. It’s beautifully written, and a bit dark, and so poetic. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Here are the first four chapters:

51 The Apple Stone, Ch. 1: The Golden Apple
52 The Apple Stone, Ch. 2: Bird Of Paradise
53 The Apple Stone, Ch. 3: Lost – One Old Rug
54 The Apple Stone, Ch. 4: The Bleep

Oops, forgot to post these chapters as they went up on my podcast feed. Here are the remaining chapters of Half Magic, by Edward Eager:

46 Half Magic Ch.4 What Happened to Katharine
47 Half Magic Ch.5 What Happened to Martha
48 Half Magic Ch.6 What Happened to Jane
49 Half Magic Ch.7 How it Ended
50 Half Magic Ch.8 How it Began Again

And that’s the end of Half Magic. If you liked it, go read all of Edward Eager’s other books! “Magic by the Lake” is the next one.

It’s time for a new story in the “Kayray Reads to You” podcast. This is “Half Magic” by Edward Eager, a wonderful book and the first part of a whole series of in which ordinary children have magic adventures. The author acknowledges his debt to E. Nesbit in every book. I hope you enjoy this one, and I hope you’ll track down more of Eager’s books. Ooo look, here’s a lovely little boxed set!
http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Magic-Boxed-Edward-Eager/dp/0152025464!

Episode 43:
Half Magic Ch.1 How it Began – 21:09
Episode 44:
Half Magic Ch.2 What Happened to their Mother – 13:59
Episode 45:
Half Magic Ch.3 What Happened to Mark – 34:34

Here are the last two chapters of part 3 of This Country of Ours:

27 How The Quakers First Came to new England – 00:09:27
28 How Maine and New Hampshire were Founded – 00:08:27

Oops. Forgot :) This will catch you up with the podcast feed:

Episode 32: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 11, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 11, Part 2 (8:52)
Episode 33: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 1 (9:59)
Episode 34: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 2 (5:27)
Episode 35: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 1 (8:02)
Episode 36: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 2 (4:38)
Episode 37: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 1 (9:39)
Episode 38: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 2 (9:36)
Episode 39: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 3 (7:10)
Episode 40: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 1 (7:44)
Episode 41: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 2 (8:15)

And the very last part:
Episode 42: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 3 (8:30)

LOL! How I love the Bagthorpes.