Listening to the Treebobs

For reading enrichment the other day, the girls listened to a set of Treebobs radio plays that they were given by the series' publicist. Radio plays are a whole different ballgame from audiobooks, and the girls, who already love audiobooks, were THRILLED by this one. There are sound effects, and different voices, and music--it's pretty exciting. The imagery is vivid, it's full of action, and each story is relatively short, so you could get through one in less than 20 minutes, IF your kid didn't insist on then listening to all the other stories next, like my kids always do.

It's a really different comprehension activity, too, to listen to a audio dramatization instead of an audiobook. When I asked the girls to tell me about the Treebobs, Sydney, who's normally a great narrator, had this to say:

"The Treebobs are about little fairies and Treebobs, and how witches sometimes do what they have to do."

However, when I asked each girl to illustrate one specific scene from the story we'd just listened to ("The Treebobs and the Dizzy Broomsticks") and then caption it, the results were much more sophisticated:

Isn't that interesting? It's clearly stretching a different part of their brains, to inspire such a different response from audiobooks.

Treebobs have been on HEAVY rotation ever since, beating out the girls' usual audiobook choices of fairy tales, Bunnicula, Tinkerbell stories, Thor's Wedding Day, and whatever other 25 audiobooks that we've got checked out of the library right now. I'm currently searching for more children's offerings in the audio dramatization genre, which is a tricky one to search for in our library's online catalog. We already like these guys--

--but surely there are more?