The Best Free Audiobooks for Your Next Family Road Trip
A family road trip is a great way to bring your family together, spend some much needed quality time and get away from the craziness of daily life. But sometimes those long hours in a car on a road trip can get stressful. This is where I’d like to help. In this post I am going to let you in on our family’s favorite ways to pass the time on those long driving days and also how you too can turn this time on the road into a fun experience.
Read More: The Ultimate Family Road Trip Guide (Keys to Success When Traveling with Kids.)
Audiobooks
One fantastic way to pass the time while driving for hours, is to listen to audiobooks. With audiobooks, time on the road seems to fly by. And this is a great option to include when switching between listening to music, playing car games or letting your kids play with their car toys.
Read More: 10 Fantastic Small Road Trips Toys for Toddlers to Teens! (Non-electronic)
It always amazes me just how much my own kids love simply listening a story while we travel! (And I have to admit that my husband and I absolutely love the complete silence from our kids as they intently listen to the story as well.)
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Audiobooks For Younger Children
When our children were younger, we kept our audio listening to mainly short stories and fairy tales on free websites like storynory.com. If you haven’t heard of this site, you should definitely check it out. They have hours and hours of the classic fairytales, myths, educational stories, poems, bible stories and even a bunch of their own original stories.
Travel Tip: Check out their site ahead of your trip and download some of your favorites to save on your data usage while traveling and to avoid the stress of trying to find the perfect stories for your kids at a moments notice.
Audiobooks for 7 years and up
As our children grew older, so did the length of our audiobooks. I also began to try and match the audiobook with where we were going, if possible. For example, we listened to Little House on the Prairie when we traveled out west in the United States and we listened to Anne of Green Gables before heading out to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
The Classics
I have also found that audiobooks while traveling is a great way to introduce my kids to books that they probably wouldn’t have picked up on their own otherwise.
In our family, we have three boys, and so choosing some of the classics to listen to like The Secret Garden, Heidi or Little Women (as well as the ones mentioned above) has been an excellent way to broaden their reading choices with books that lied outside their norm. And I am so glad that I started doing this because my boys have absolutely loved these classics!
(Side note: My three boys tend to choose Fantasy books or current popular books for their age to read.)
Read More: 20+ Best Fantasy Book Series for Tweens
Free Audiobooks
One way I love getting free audiobooks is through my Amazon Prime account, which is a service that I know a ton of people already have. But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered the Amazon Prime benefit that includes Prime Reading.
Listen for Free with Prime!
With Prime Reading, on certain books, you can Read and Listen to them for Free! To me, this was perfect! You just click on the “Read and Listen for Free” button that’s above the Kindle purchase price and it immediately goes into your Kindle Library. I like to keep the Kindle app on my phone (for ease when traveling) and from there you just click on the book icon, and tap the first page. Down at the bottom it will say “Audible Narration” & “Tap to Download.” Once you do this then you are all set for your trip, and this is all Free! From here, the book will be read aloud to you whenever you hit play. It’s so easy to do!
Now please note that not every book through Prime reading has an audio version, so make sure you look for the ones that say Read and Listen for Free. I’ve had the best luck with the AmazonClassics Series. So far, all of these books that I’ve looked at have an audio version and our family has been really happy with the quality of the storytelling.
Side Note: If you don’t have an Amazon Prime Account then you can always try a Free Trial of Audible Plus or try a Kindle Unlimited Membership
So Let’s Go Find Free Audiobooks for Your Family!
Free Audio Books – with Amazon Prime
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Listen and Read for Free with Amazon Prime!
Also free with a Kindle Unlimited or Audible Subscription.
Andersen’s Fairy Tales – By Hans Christian Andersen
20 Classic Fairy Tales including: The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Little Thumbelina, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid and more.
Audio Length – 6 hours
Audio Length – 5 hours and 46 minutes
Reading Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 7 years and up
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – By Lewis Carroll
Audio Length: 2 hours and 42 minutes
Reading Age Recommendation – 8 years and up
The Jungle Book – By Rudyard Kipling
Audio Length: 5 hours and 16 minutes
Reading Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 8 years and up
Length – 8 hours 51 minutes
Reading Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 9 years and up
The Secret Garden
Audio Length: 7 hours and 13 minutes
Reading Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 9 years and up
This book is one of our family’s favorites!
Anne of Green Gables – by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Reading Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 9 years and up
Our youngest was 6 when he listened to this story and although I’m sure some of her eloquent speech and vocabulary went over his head, he still absolutely loved this classic story.
Little Women – By Louisa May Alcott
Audio Length: 10 hours and 37 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 10 years and up
Treasure Island – By Robert Louis Stevenson
Audio Length: 5 hours and 55 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 10/11 years and up
Length – 8 hours and 30 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 11/12 years and up
Robinson Crusoe – By Daniel Defoe
Audio Length: 13 hours and 43 minutes
Age Recommendation – 12 years and up
More Great Free Audiobooks for Older Children Include:
- Call of the Wild by Jack London (12+ years)
- White Fang by Jack London (12+ years)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (12+ years)
- The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (12+ years)
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (12+years)
Free Audiobooks, but with Kindle Unlimited or an Audible Subscription
but not free with Amazon Prime
The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe – By C.S. Lewis
Audio Length: 4 hours and 21 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 8 years and up
Little House on the Prairie – by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Length – 5 hours and 45minutes
Age Recommendation – 8 years and up
Audio Length: 8 hours and 18 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 8 years and up
The Hobbit – By J.R.R. Tolkien
Audio Length: 11 Hours and 5 minutes
Age Recommendation by Common Sense Media – 9 years and up
I hope you were able to find a few Free Audiobooks here for your next Family Road Trip! Please let me know in the comments section if know of more easy ways to find free audiobooks or have any favorites that we should check out.
Have a Great Trip with Your Traveling Feet!
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