Listening station

[green hippo]

Hi,

I have always struggled with having a fully working listening station - I have had ear-phones into a CD player and an MP3 player with normal speakers but both have been broken even though the children have been carefully shown how to use them and haven't broken them on purpose - just through over-use and small parts.

I am considering whether to buy another MP3 player/new earphone set-up. Do you have a listening station? How is it used and how much?

I had a memory stick with the class nursery rhymes and action songs on and had intended putting some Julia Donaldson stories on before the MP3 player was broken but didn't really have anything else to put on. The children put the dancing/singing songs on the other CD player near the carpet to move to and play music to but we find that the CDs do get scratched after a while even if it's just adults changing them. The children did listen to the nursery rhymes by themselves - just not really sure what to do... We don't really have any money to buy anything (it will be my money!)...

Thanks,

Green Hippo x

[Stargrower]

i don't really have any advice as we are in the same situation and have been through endless CD players and even a big Coomber listening station. That broke after little more than a year and Coomber wanted to charge me £60.00 just to collect it let alone fix it!

One thing I can say is that we copy CD's now, use the copy with the children and have the original as the 'master' copy.

I'll be checking in to see what others suggest.

[Fredbear]

We have storyphones, kindly purchased from lovely HappyMaz. The children adore listening to stories, rhymes and songs on them.

You can record and purchase additional resources too.

We have the most wonderful snap of three children sitting at the mark making table listening to them too.

We try to encourage the children to sit in our quiet area to access them, but with your older children they can actually move around with them within a radius too.

Might be worth a look.