We’ve only had the Yoto player for 3 days now, but it’s a hit! My daughter absolutely loves her Yoto player and has barely put it down over the last few days. She has already finished four books and uses the player to fall asleep every night. In fact, the first day she had it, she climbed into bed with me during the afternoon, while I was reading, and fell right asleep listening to a book. She never takes a nap but she was warm and quiet and passed right out.
In addition to playing audiobooks, the Yoto player does have other things it can do. Her favorite is the Yoto daily podcasts. If you do buy a Yoto player they have an app that is pretty cool all by itself. The app is full of extras like podcast options, kids’ music channels, and ways you can customize the player for your child. You can set them alarms, change the light colors on their player, and even play books or sleep sounds from your phone. I still find myself scrolling through the app and finding new things each day. In fact, there are so many options that I would be typing all day to explain them all, so I would highly suggest going to their website and taking a look. I would also suggest the Yoto Club membership. It’s $10 a month and you get two credits to spend on books, but it also gets you free shipping and a 10% discount. I would sign up for the club membership first and then order my Yoto player to get the discount and free shipping.
If you want to order a player but not the membership everyone with a player has a code for 10% off your first purchase over $69.99. Mine is https://prz.io/1dGAgBas0. I do get points to use on their website if you use that code. I do not believe you can stack the 10% code and the Yoto Club membership 10% off. It seems to be one or the other.
As of right now, my daughter says the Yoto player was her favorite Christmas present and she’s thrilled with it. I can’t recommend it enough if you have a child who likes to listen to their own books, music, etc. It’s screen-free so there is no concern with them stumbling upon something they shouldn’t. I love that I don’t have to worry about anything and I feel completely safe letting her have full control over the player and what she listens to on it. It is 100% a hit in our house.
My last post was on our switch to Kindle e-readers and now I want to talk about audiobook options. My daughter is going through a big audiobook phase and wants to have one available at all times. I don’t love having her take my phone constantly, that’s where audible is, so I started looking for other options. One option is the Kindle. You can get audible on a Kindle but I haven’t really loved this as an actual solution. My biggest complaint is the Kindle will only work with Bluetooth headphones. It has a charger port just like my phone, that my phone will take headphones in, but the Kindle won’t. I don’t want everything we listen to to be on Bluetooth, so this ruins the Kindle for me as an audiobook option for her.
A second very simple option and one we use often is a Bluetooth speaker and my phone or computer. This works great and she can take it to her room and listen but again I am not a fan of her having my phone all the time or using it for sleep sounds and my phone dying. I have a friend who got her kids old iPods and using the library to put rented audiobooks on them, but the library is changing formats and that isn’t working for them anymore either.
So, this leads me to her Christmas present and what I hope ends up being the perfect solution for us. I ordered her a Yoto player. https://us.yotoplay.com/. It’s an audio player that has no screen and no access to the internet. You buy the books on yoto cards and they insert into the player and play the book. She wanted the larger one which also works as an alarm clock, plays kid-friendly podcasts, and sleep sounds. I also went ahead and grabbed one for my four-year-old nephew as it’s perfect for little kids as well. It even has an alarm clock mode where the light will stay red until it’s an acceptable time for them to get out of bed. That is something I wanted when my kids were smaller. The Yoto cards do get a little pricey, but they have a Yoto Club membership that will help with the expense. It’s pretty similar to what you would pay for an audible subscription. If you are going to order one go ahead and sign up for the Yoto Club because you get 10% off of your orders and free shipping.
Since this is her Christmas present we haven’t opened it yet and got to play around with it. I can’t say for sure this is going to be what we want it to be, but I am very hopeful this is going to be a good solution. I definitely think it’s worth looking into if you are looking for an internet-free and screen-free option for audiobooks for your kids. I will update here as soon as we have used it a bit.
I know, I know! As homeschool moms and book readers, we prefer physical books that we can have on shelves all over the house. Books everywhere! I was the same way. My home library was quite large, and I was proud of all the amazing books I had available for my kids to read. However, we’ve recently made a change that we love and I think it might be worth considering in your own home.
We have switched over to mostly Kindle reading or e-books. I have had a Kindle for years and have switched back and forth between it and physical books many times. Currently, it has become my go-to for one very specific reason. I can adjust the text size on my Kindle. I have had glasses since 9th grade and as I’ve gotten older I have been told I need readers. My eyes are pretty sensitive and I have found myself straining, even with readers, to read the tiny words that some books have. My Kindle has helped this problem so much. It’s super simple to adjust the text size all you do is pinch and move your fingers like you’re zooming in on your phone. My kids tease me about how large my font is, but my eyes are sure thanking me. I also really just enjoy reading on the Kindle. Somehow it makes it feel like the books go faster and I have read so many more books in the past two months than I did the whole previous year because I finally picked my Kindle back up. The Kindle also has a backlight on it and I’ve been getting a good chunk of my reading done at night comfy in bed. I love it and I have now switched my children to a Kindle as well.
Kindle Kids
Back in October when Amazon had its most recent Prime Day I picked up a Kindle kids for my kids to share. When on sale, the Kindle kids is a great option. The Kindle comes with a case and a full year of Kindle kids, which is basically Kindle Unlimited but for children’s books. Both series that we were reading were available on that subscription for free. It has been wonderful. They can take the Kindle in the car, to sports practice, in the bath, to bed, basically anywhere, and read. I have seen them read so much more than when they had to carry a physical book around. Not to mention the ease with which we can get a book. For example, my oldest is currently reading through the Harry Potter series. We own two different copies of this series. One of them is older and the cover was starting to fall apart as he read it, the other is the large illustrated version, which isn’t very easy to carry around and read. We tried borrowing a copy from the library and that also was old and falling apart. So, the Kindle came in, and we downloaded his book, and he was able to read it without worrying about his book falling apart. As soon as he has finished a book the next is readily available to download and read. My younger child was also able to get the Warriors series which our closest library didn’t have in stock and has started reading that. As of now, I have no complaints, except that the kids have only one Kindle to share. So, for Christmas, I bought another and now they will each have one. On top of the kid’s Kindle I also grabbed myself a new one for Christmas. It doesn’t come with a cover or a subscription like the kids ones, but my old Kindle was going on about 8 years old and had a few cracks in the screen. I forced myself to put it under the tree but I can’t wait to open it up and use it.
Decluttering
Another benefit of the Kindle, and the reason I started thinking about them in the first place, is my ability to clear out the house a little. As I mentioned earlier we had quite a large amount of books in our home. I love books and I loved having them on the shelves, but in reality, they were taking up a lot of space. We had books that I bought years ago because I found a good deal and I was really hoping to get to, but they were still sitting on the shelf unread. So, I cleared out a ton of our books. In fact, I did this while I went through a rather large decluttering of the whole house. I kept the books we have read and loved and a few others that I felt were worthy of keeping, but I got rid of probably 80 percent of our physical books. If it gets to a point where I want to read some of the ones we decluttered we have the library or our Kindle subscriptions. Im really happy with the switch we made and the kids seem to love it as well.
Where to get books
If you switch to a Kindle you do not have to buy e-books or a Kindle subscription. If you have a library card you can borrow e-books from the library for free. My library links directly to Amazon and sends them straight to my Kindle. There is also the Libby app, which I don’t have so I can’t say a lot about it, but I’ve heard from tons of people that it’s great. I have recently bought myself a Kindle Unlimited subscription because it went on sale and has quite a few of the books I like to read, but be aware Kindle Unlimited doesn’t always have the most popular books. There is also a website called BookBub that you can tell your preferences to and you get daily emails with deals on e-books from your favorite categories. Most of those are around $2-$3. It’s not quite as fun as getting a box of books in the mail but you can get the book you are waiting on much faster and often times cheaper. I’m sure there are many other options but those are the ones I use.
Lastly, you can get audiobooks on your Kindle. You can listen via Bluetooth from your Kindle, no wired headphones, which I don’t love, but it is an option. The Kindle kids subscription has a few available with it, not really popular ones, but still an option. I will probably keep up with our audible since that’s where the books we want are, but it is another benefit of the Kindle.
Books are the most important thing in our homeschool. For me raising kids who read well, and love to read, has always been a top priority. I am a firm believer that if you can read, you can learn. Sadly statistics show that most people do not pick up a book again after high school. There are many many adults out there who chose to never read again. This is heartbreaking to me because I LOVE a good book. I have learned so much as an adult from the books I read. When I wanted to homeschool the kids, I read books for homeschoolers. I’ve read parenting books, gardening books, marriage books, all kinds of non-fiction books, and of course fiction. There is so much to learn and reading has helped me get there. This is something I want to instill in my children. Because of this, I try really hard every year to make sure we have really good books on hand. If I know my kids have an interest in a topic, I will spend hours researching books for them that include that topic. I am not always successful, but over the years we have read quite a few books that we still talk about today. Those books will stay with us for a long time, hopefully forever. With that in mind, I have started picking out our required reading for next year. I like to give them a few books that I want them to read over the school year, and then leave room for interest lead reading. I went to my bookshelf this morning and pulled four books each for my kids, as well as four for our read alouds. We will finish quite a few more than that, and I may add more as assigned reading, but this felt like a good place to start.
School Year Read Alouds
There are a few books that I have been wanting to get to for a couple of years and we just haven’t been able to get them read. The problem with great books is there are tons of them and you can’t read them all. So, this year I have added The War that Saved My Life and Esperonza Rising to our required reading lists. I have heard about both these books for the past few years and it’s time we make room for them. Every review I have seen about either of these books has been incredibly positive and they seem to come highly recommended. Thirst and Hello Universe are newer ones to me. I have recently seen both recommended on Booktube videos. Again, they got really great reviews. I have a ton of other books in mind for read alouds, but these four are going to be made a priority for our upcoming school year.
My son will be going into 7th grade this year. His main interests these days are space and video games. These can be tricky topics to find books on, or at least hard to find good quality books on. I did find a few good ones this past year, but he went through those pretty quickly. I do know he also tends to like things that are more realistic, almost like non-fiction, so I tried to keep that in mind for his choices. I also get suggestions from Read Aloud Revival and their book lists by age and gender. Here are his current four for the upcoming school year.
Edge of Extinction. He tried this once a few years back, but didn’t get into it. I want him to try again. https://a.co/d/dL2t6cL
Gone to the Woods. I read this and it was really good. I think he will enjoy it. https://a.co/d/9wpPyEN
My daugher will be going into 5th grade this year, and she loves books that have animals in them. Last year she read Crenshaw and loved it. One of her other all-time favorites is Mr. Poppers Penguins. I kept that in mind when pulling books for her, but I also chose ones that I want her to read. A few of them are classics that are recommended on every list I have ever seen for children’s literature.
Even though I added Amazon links, I do not tend to buy my books from Amazon. Where we lived previously, we participated in a homeschool program that gave us money each year for supplies, and I used that to fund quite a bit of our homeschool library. A lot of our original books came from our Bookshark curriculum and the others mostly from Barnes and Noble. That program also gave me a card saying I was a homeschool teacher which Barnes and Noble offers a teacher discount for. I no longer have that card, but I have seen that you can make one somehow. I may have to look into that for the future. Currently I order almost all my books from BookOutlet. You can’t always find everything you want, but they do have a really good selection most of the time. I get most of my classic books there, as well as some books that are newer on the recommendation lists. I do have a referal link that will get you $5 off, and me as well, if anyone would like to give them a try. They offer this referral code to everyone with an account. I am not working with them in any way. https://bookoutlet.com/loyalty/referral/N4bee5V5?c=url. Other than that I try and use our local library. I love having a good home library built up, but that can get pretty expensive. The library is a great option to help with that.
Recommendations
There are a few places that I get book recommendations. First is from the lists on Read Aloud Revivlas website https://readaloudrevival.com/recommends/. Sarah Mackenzie is the author of the Read Aloud Handbook and her entire website is dedicated to books. This is a great starting place if you need book options. Second I watch YouTube. My kids are mostly in the middle school years, so the videos about MiddleGrade March are really helpful to me. However, there are homeschool moms who make book videos, book influencers, and all kinds of options. I just find a few people I like and that seem to have similar tastes and values in books, and use those for recommendations. When I see a book recommended in multiple places I tend to try and find that one for our home library.
I hope this helps give you a few ideas for the upcoming school year, and encourages you to read and to get your children reading. It is a game changer for everyone when they find that first book that makes them fall in love with reading.
Wattles and Combs Farm 