“A Christmas Carol” read by James Eckhouse

“The Story of Hanukkah” read by Peter Jacobson

“The Fir Tree” ready by Phil Brock

“Jingle Bells”

“Rock of Ages”

“Deck the Halls”

“The Dreidel Song”

and more holiday songs

Holiday e-cards

Arts and Crafts Activities

We’re really excited here about the release of our new album featuring six great stories read by stars from General Hospital.

Visit our friends at Soap Central for some great behind-the-scenes footage from the recording, then watch the stories here at Speakaboos:

“Billy and the Brown Out” read by Greg Vaughan

“Bluebeard” read by Rebecca Herbst

“Frankenstein” read by Greg Vaughan

“The Frog Prince” read by Kelly Monaco and Jason Thompson

“The Little Mermaid” read by Kelly Monaco and Jason Thompson

“The Wise Little Girl” read by Rebecca Herbst

When you’re not out tricking or treating this Halloween, there’s plenty to do at Speakaboos:

Watch one of our spooky stories, like our brand-new storybook video Frankenstein, or the now-classic Billy and the Witch.

Then, scare your brain silly with the online Halloween Word Search Game, and print-out instructions for some creepy arts and crafts:  make your own Witch Hat and Monster Ooze (PDF printouts).

Happy haunting!

Mark your calendars–this Labor Day, Monday, 9/7, our friends at PBS KIDS and the Jim Henson Company are launching a brand new show!

Dinosaur Train is about an orphaned toddler T-Rex named Buddy who is taken in by a family of Pteranodons. Buddy and his newfound family ride the Dinosaur Train to different prehistoric eras where they learn about their dinosaur heritage. This great new show will center on themes of family, tolerance, history, and of course, plenty of dinosaurs and trains!

If you’ve been to Speakaboos.com this week you’ve seen all the new dinosaur-related activities we’re rolling out to celebrate, including:

- A sneak preview of Dinosaur Train

- “What Dinosaur Are You?” interactive game widget

- Dinosaur “Memory Match” game

- Dinosaur “Quiz Whiz” trivia game

- Make your own dinosaur mask print-out (pdf download)

Encourage your young ones to read this summer with Speakaboos storybook videos—use our handy summer reading list to make sure you get the most out of the summer hours!

Family activities (PDF file downloads):
•    Arts and Crafts: Build a Birdhouse, Make Your Own Guitar, Cotton Ball Hare
•    Recipes: Mediterranean Fruit Kebobs, Banana Hot Dogs, Chicken Fingers
•    Coloring Pages: Jack and the Beanstalk, The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella
•    And much more at our Activities Page

So remember a little while back when we blogged about how the Huffington Post called our Crispin Glover-narrated nursery rhymes creepy? Well, a few weeks later, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon had Michael Emerson (the creepy guy who plays Ben on Lost) on the show, and Fallon thought it would be funny to get him to read a nursery rhyme in a creepy voice! (go here for video)

I’m pretty sure Fallon’s writers got the idea from us, because weeks earlier his bloggers happened to pick up the Huffington Post story about Crispin Glover.

But as it turns out, Speakaboos wasn’t the first to the idea after all! Check out this hilarious clip from The Simpsons:

Do we at least get points for having Simpsons vet Harry Shearer on the site?

Glubble.com is an exciting new online resource that helps families safely enjoy the internet together. Part social network and part web browser/filter, Glubble provides your family with an online meeting place to post pictures and messages for each other, and allows parents to monitor and regulate young children’s internet use.

One of the cool things about Glubble is that it uses your existing web browser, but allows you to “lock” it for your kids so they can only access pre-approved websites. Glubble provides a list of suggested websites, and parents can pick and choose which ones they like, as well as suggest other sites they would like their kids to use.

Once you are a Glubble member, you can find Speakaboos under the “New Collections” section of the family page. There, you can choose to activate Speakaboos and it will appear as an approved site under the “Collections” section of the kids page.

Our friends at PBS KIDS are airing a new Super WHY! 2-hour special, Hurray for Heroes, today in honor of Memorial Day. Check your local listings to find out when it’s on in your neighborhood!

Also, if you haven’t been to Speakaboos.com lately, it’s not too late to see our newest features brought to you by Super WHY!:

Kids Karaoke

Educational Games

New Printables

Occasionally at Speakaboos we get a few complaints from people who object to the “violent” or “scary” content of some of our stories (the trials and tribulations of “Little Red Riding Hood” are well-known and well-documented). And yes, I would agree that a story like our original “Billy and the Witch” (it features a witch and a very, very mean cat) is probably not for every 3-5 year old.

But an article by Liza Featherstone on Babble.com this week questioned whether or not modern kids’ media tries too hard to protect young children from violent, scary or sad stories.

The article argues that parents (and children’s media) today are far more concerned than parents of yesteryear about “messing up” their kids, and this concern has led to the proliferation of more nice, safe, uncontroversial books and stories, and also the re-envisioning of many well-known stories.

I tend to agree with Featherstone’s well-researched argument that a little bit of violence or negative emotion is not going to ruin a child. After all, just because many of us can remember the scene where Bambi’s mother dies as a traumatic experience does not mean that we are any worse off because of it.

Of course, the majority of stories on Speakaboos.com are nice, fun, happy, and pretty much very safe and sanitary. And we love the fact that Arthur has become so popular simply by featuring stories that relate to everyday life.

However, we are dedicated to featuring a wide variety of stories, both old and new, happy and sad, for caretakers to choose from.

At Speakaboos we believe that kids should learn that a story is just a story, and hopefully learn to appreciate it as such.

Featherstone writes about how she told her 3-year old son Ivan a version of “The Three Little Pigs” where nobody dies, but he prefers the 1988 Golden Books version with a body count of three. What’s great about this isn’t that kids enjoy violence or scariness, but rather, that now Ivan knows that there is more than one way to tell a story.

So the moral of the story is, a little bit of scariness or violence isn’t going to mess up your child, especially if it helps your child understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

With that in mind, if you think your child can handle a little bit of unpleasantness, feel free to enjoy Tim Daly’s reading of “Little Red Riding Hood,” where the big bad wolf gets cut open with a pair of scissors, or Mark Thompson’s version of Oscar Wilde’s heartbreaking story “The Nightingale and the Rose” (spoiler alert:  the nightingale dies at the end), or our upcoming release of Judy Tenuta’s retelling of “The Three Little Pigs” (spoilers:  pigs die, and it’s hilarious!).

Looks like we’re really starting to get noticed!

http://www.kidscreen.com/articles/magazine/20090327/speakaboos.html