Sample the Magic Tree House Series for Free and Cheap
If your children enjoy the Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne -- or you're just looking for something diverting to put on an iPod for waiting-room kiddie distraction -- the iTunes store has a great deal running now through October 23 that you may want to check out.
The complete audiobook for the first entry in the series, Dinosaurs Before Dark, is being offered as a free download. The remaining entries, from Book #2, The Knight at Dawn, to Book #38, Monday With a Mad Genius, can be downloaded for $1.95 each. The books are read by the author, and range in length from about 37 minutes to over an hour.
I found this series to be a really great choice for my reluctant-reading daughter when she was younger. It's really the first series that she had any enthusiasm for. The simple language, short chapters, and relatively straightforward storylines helped her make it through a book with less struggle than usual. And the history lessons they provided stuck with her.
Other parents have reported that their reading-challenged children had trouble with the stories' fantasy elements, though, and I'm not sure my girl ever did really grasp why these kids were ricocheting through time. Maybe the best thing about the free download is that it gives you an opportunity to listen to one of the books and decide whether it's right for your young reader. Then, if it is, load 'em up.
Book cover image courtesy of PriceGrabber. Compare prices for "Dinosaurs Before Dark."
I teach middle school age students with moderate mental disabilities and/or Autism. I use the Magic Tree House series as a basis for my literature units. Because several of my students are nonverbal and function significantly below that of same age peers, I have to summarize and adapt the books, but they are listening to the stories and answering comprehension questions about the chapters using picture symbols and/or voice output devices that I program with choices. I pulled most of the questions from a web site that I discovered. The students are even taking test on the stories with great success!!! This is an amazing series that has a broad range of interests and it makes it unbelievably easy to pull in factual information for the students to learn. For example, during the Thanksgiving on Thursday book, we discussed Columbus’s voyage, the Mayflower, and we compared the Pilgrims to the Wampanoag Indians. My students gained a ton of information and they are retaining some of the information because the stories are interesting to them. I have adapted over 10 MTH books so far and plan to continue through the entire series! What a great resource, thanks to the author, Mary Pope Osborne!!!