Audio Story: A Chinese Fairytale

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A Chinese Fairytale was written in 1904, by Laurence Housman. He was from England and wrote many stories, novels and plays. This story first appeared in a book of stories called The Blue Moon. It tells of the young Tiki-pu who wants desperately to learn how to paint. But he is only a servant and must resort to trickery in order to learn his craft.

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Read by Alessandro Cima
Duration: 00:18:33

Here’s the full audio script:

Tiki-pu was a small grub of a thing; but he had a true love of Art deep down in his soul. There it hung mewing and complaining, struggling to work its way out through the raw exterior that bound it.

Tiki-pu’s master professed to be an artist: he had apprentices and students, who came daily to work under him, and a large studio littered about with the performances of himself and his pupils. On the walls hung also a few real works by the older men, all long since dead.

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Audio Story: Stuttering Stan Takes a Stand

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StutteringStan

Duration: 14:24

Here’s a good one for the kids! Children’s author Artie Knapp strikes again with this charming tale about friendship and the confidence to stand your ground.

Stanley is like most squirrels: he loves nuts, climbing trees and playing with friends. But Stanley feels different from the other animals in his neighborhood, because he has a problem with words. Teased and bullied about his stuttering, Stanley refuses to let on that his feelings are being hurt, until one day he learns an important lesson from a new friend.

If you enjoy this audiobook version of the story, you’ll really love the book itself!  Go ahead and learn more about how to order one right here.  You’ll be supporting a great writer who brings his own unique and gentle sense of humor to every tale he tells.

This audio story is read by Alessandro Cima.

We Make Stories: Oddly Deceptive Membership Site from Penguin Books

Penguin’s Puffin Books has a new membership site called We Make Stories, where kids can use an online tool to create stories.  There are several types of story creation, including a remix tool to use on existing classic tales, a map maker, and a comic book style creator.  It’s all drag and drop type stuff and is intended to teach creativity and encourage literacy.

While this is reasonably fun-looking, I cannot understand why a site would present itself for pay membership and not really give any useful demonstration versions of its tools.  There is a single demo based on remixing old stories, but this is not sufficient to make me want to offer $9.99.  That price, by the way, is very effectively hidden from view and presented in a rather disturbing manner.  Here’s what I mean:

1. First create a user name and password and give us your parent’s email address.

2. Your parent will then get an email asking them to pay for the membership (£5.99/$9.99).

3. Once your parent has paid this, your membership will be activated and you can start to play all the games.

Those are the instruction on the sign-up page.  So kids are expected to blunder forth and sign up without the benefit of an effective demonstration.  Give away a parent’s email address without permission.  Then the parent receives an email demanding money.  No sir.  Absolutely not.  You put the price in big print on the front page and you don’t mislead children into presenting their parents with an unexpected request for money.  Everything should be up-front and visible right at the beginning.  I just can’t believe what I’m seeing online from a major publisher.  Perhaps we have here an example of how the publishing industry intends to get money out of people – by tricking their children.

The WotWots: Excellent Pre-School TV Show

Two fantastic, insane and rambunctious little alien characters travel around in a steampunk spaceship.  The WotWots is a children’s television show from Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, the company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings.  This introductory episode shows the two WotWots landing at the zoo to explore the various animals there.  The WotWots are very inquisitive and energetic little beings with a great joy for adventure.  I like it.  It looks really good and the characters are the best I’ve seen in years.

Thanks to Boing Boing for posting this.

President Obama Reads ‘Where the Wild Things Are’

He reads the entire book out loud to a group of kids at the White House Easter Egg Roll.  Watch him.  He wings it.  He improvises.  He throws himself completely into what he is doing for these kids.  He knows they can’t all see the pictures so he describes and even performs them.  I know just how difficult this performance really is.  There are few people who can pull this off.  We have a president who is actually an intelligent person and who enjoys reading and talking to people.  I think this is a very good video for Children’s Book Week.