Review and Giveaway: Giddio – audio adventures for kids!

My girls love to listen to music – we listen in the van, in the house, and they each have a CD player in their rooms that they can listen to as well. But there are a lot of times when the girls either can’t agree on something to listen to, or they are tired of the same songs over and over again. Lately, they’ve begun listening much more often to the few audio books that we have – and we’ve recently discovered something that’s even more fun to listen to – audio adventures, from Giddio.

What they are:

What makes an audio adventures different from an audio book or story is the fact that these are professionally produced, with a full cast of voice actors, music and sound effects similar to the olden time radio dramas. From the website:

Exciting and funny audio adventures leave more to the imagination for kids than TV. The reception of audio adventures and audio books is more associative. Limited to sound kids can put themselves into the story more easily. They can also participate easier emotionally. At the same time they can easier manage the intensity of their emotions. They can dream themselves into exciting adventures, but they can also easily take themselves out of such situations: Open their eyes and stop the recording.

Giddio offers a series of audio adventures for kids between the ages of 3 and 7. Each adventure is between 30 and 45 minutes long and features the character of Billy Brown, a friendly talking bear, whose best friend, Emma, is along for some fun adventures.

Because these are audio recordings, you can listen to them anywhere that you have a music player available – at home, in the car, at bedtime, or on the go using an MP3 player.

Here’s my our take on them:

Courtesy of Giddio, we received one of the audio adventure CDs to try out. The one we’ve listened to is called “Billy Brown Goes Hiking” and has Billy and Emma heading off into the woods for a hike and a picnic, which is interrupted by a family needing their help for a daring rescue. I’ve played it for my girls through our family stereo, and also have it on both of their MP3 players so they can listen whenever they want to, on their own.

When I heard the story for the first time, I wasn’t sure how well it would keep my interest, without anything to watch. But it really did – I was able to just close my eyes and imagine the characters and the story. Not having the visual cues really makes you use your own ideas to think about how they look and appear. The dramatic aspect was also really enjoyable – having separate voices for each character makes them easy to distinguish, and the sound effects just really adds life right into the adventure. It’s not a story so much as a real performance, and I can see why my girls like it so much.

The bottom line:

Audio adventures are more than just something to listen to – they engage kids and draw them right into the action. Giddio provides a great solution to all those questions: How to get kids to bed? How to limit their TV watching? What to do on a car ride? Billy Brown and his friends offer a fun alternative that helps enrich kids’ vocabularies and challenges them to use their imaginations.

Where can you find them?:

The site is located at http://Giddio.com. You can order any of the CDs directly from the site for $10.99 plus shipping, or you can enjoy a free download of ‘Billy Brown and the Mystery Package’. You can also listen to samples of the adventures right on the site as well.

Would you like to try one?:

I have the opportunity to give away a copy of the “Billy Brown Goes Hiking” CD to a lucky reader! If you would like to enjoy one of the audio adventures from Giddio with your kids, here are the rules:

1. Enter by visiting the Giddio site and leaving a comment here to let me know who you would like to win this for. Please don’t just say ‘choose me’, or your entry will be discarded.
2. The contest will run until Thursday, February 5th at 11:59 pm EST. The winner will be selected through random drawing, contacted by e-mail, listed on this post and also submitted to PRIZEY.Fetch. US entries only, please.
3. Please leave a valid e-mail address or other way to contact you! If you don’t wish to leave your e-mail address, please make sure that you leave a unique name and check back with PRIZEYWinners to see if you won. If the winner hasn’t responded within 3 days, an alternate winner will be chosen by random drawing.
4. If you’d like extra entries, you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed (click on the orange icon in the upper right sidebar) or subscribe via e-mail – leave me a separate comment to let me know.
• Mention this contest on your blog with a link back to this post and to Giddio, and leave a separate comment with the link to your post so I can find it.
• Either Twitter about, ‘Stumble’, ‘Digg’ or ‘Kirtsy’ this post – leave me a separate comment with your username at whichever site you chose (one extra entry per method).

So that’s a total of 7 comments/entries if you do all of the extra entry options.

Good luck! 

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED – the random number generator has chosen comment #19 as the winner:

Congratulations to Lindley (no blog) who said, “My 4-year-old son would probably get a kick out of this-thanks!” I will be e-mailing your shortly to work out the details.