Kids Takeover hoopla!

The Abbot Public Library’s most recent addition to online services, hoopla, continues to expand its offerings by creating collections tailored to specific audiences. Recently, the hard working content experts at hoopla have curated collections for kids, called the Kids’ Takeover. These collections of children’s audiobooks, comics, ebooks, music, and videos feature new releases and popular titles.

AUDIOBOOKS

Disappear to bear country in the childhood classic stories, The Berenstain Bears: Brother and Sister Bear Favorites by Jan and Mike Berenstain, or visit another popular bear from the Hundred Acre Wood in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh. You might recognize the characters from Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen’s The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor from the TV show of the same name which came out in the mid ‘90s. Part 5 of the Magic Schoolbus Audiobook series, dive down in a schoolbus-turned-submarine and explore the mysteries of the deep blue with Ms. Frizzle and her class. For something a bit more magical, listen to the second of C. S. Lewis’s popular Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Check out more audiobooks in the Kids’ Takeover Audiobook Collection.

COMICS

If you’d rather read your books than listen to them, the Kids’ Takeover Comics may be more to your taste. Snoopy, Spiderman, and Percy Jackson are just a few of the characters you’ll meet. Everybody’s favorite lazy lasagna-loving feline makes a comic appearance in Garfield: The Monday That Wouldn’t End, which we can all relate to;  Garfield: Snack Pack Vol. 3, with food, friends, and a Sam Spayed mystery; and Garfield: Garzilla, in which animals are supersized and Garfield’s human friend, Jon, might become a werewolf!

For some Avatar-style pop culture, check out Avatar: The Last Airbender: North And South Part 1, the first part of the Avatar: The Last Airbender series which continues the saga featuring Avatar Aang, as well as a title from the series featuring his successor, The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part 2.

EBOOKS

Try some oldies but goodies. Read about amphibian friends in Arnold Nobel’s Frog and Toad Together, a story originally published in 1972 in which Frog and Toad grow gardens and eat cookies together. Penguins take over in Richard and Florence Atwater’s 1938 classic, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Mr. Popper, a painter living in Stillwater, is given a penguin called Captain Cook. Soon after, he finds more and more penguins keep stopping by. This ebook includes an illustrated biography of the authors.

In the Kids’ Takeover Ebooks Collection, you’ll find even more classics such as Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, the Disney Read-Along ebooks Aladdin and Moana, and other popular stories, such as Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer and Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. 

MUSIC

The Kids’ Takeover Music Collection has some select albums, including Disney Princess: Fairy Tale Songs. Children will recognize tracks from The Little Mermaid (“Part of Your World”), Mulan (“Reflection”), Cinderella (“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”), Beauty and the Beast (“Something There”), and other Disney movies. 

For something more upbeat, Best of Raffi will have you singing (and maybe dancing) along to “Baby Beluga,” “Apples And Bananas,” “Shake My Sillies Out,” “Wheels On The Bus,” and “Mr. Sun.” So, if you’re happy and you know it, sing along with Raffi! 

After all that singing and dancing, when you’re children are ready to get tucked into bed, enjoy some nightitme sounds with Mister Rogers Bedtime, including the songs “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” “When the Day Turns to Night,” “Many Ways To Say I Love You,” and more.  

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

If you’d rather watch the Avatar than listen to audiobooks about him, go back to the beginning and stream Book 1: Water. You can also watch season 1 of Legend of Korra, the next Avatar after Aang. Kids’ Takeover: Movies collection has a lot of other familiar faces, including Elmo, Madeline, Franklin, and Arthur. For shows filled with sugar, spice and everything nice, try The Powerpuff Girls: Season 1, The Power Puff Girls (Classic): Season 1, and The Power of Four. 

It’s the first day of spring in My Little Pony: The Movie, and the Little Ponies are getting ready for a festival until Hydia and her two daughters, a trio of evil witches, try to stop the celebration. 

A mysterious power is at work in Pokémon: The First Movie which threatens human and pokémon alike. Do you know Dragons Love Tacos or Where the Wild Things Are? If not, hop over to hoopla and stream these videos now!

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Entertain Your Kids With hoopla Bonus Borrows!

Looking for a way to entertain your young children? Bonus Borrows on hoopla have been extended through May 31! There are quite a few titles children can read, watch, and listen to without it counting towards your monthly limit. Enjoy characters such as Captain Underpants, Winnie-the Pooh, and Percy Jackson.

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You can have a movie marathon with movies from hoopla’s Movies for Kids collection. Join Curious George on a series of adventures in Curious George Rides a Bike. Help catch a creature of fantasy in the How to Catch a Unicorn read along. For something a little more serious and historical, take a trip back to 1869 and ride a train on America’s new transcontinental railroad in the movie Locomotive.

Perhaps you want to help your children learn from home while schools are closed. Check out the Homeschool with hoopla collection, which was discussed in a previous blog post. Or you can give your kids a break from looking at a screen with the Children’s Favorite Music collection. Get up and move with one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters in Elmo’s Dance Party, and later you can get your kids ready for bed with Bedtime songs with Mr. Rogers.

Browse through hundreds more Bonus Borrows titles for kids and enjoy before May 31! 

Minds Behind the Magic: Favorite Children’s Authors in Audio and Film

Chances are, you’ve been spending a good bit more time with the kids recently. Are you struggling just to remember how it feels to be a child, let alone figuring out how it feels to be one in the middle of a global crisis? If so, you might turn to some old friends for inspiration–writers who, Peter Pan-like, never seemed to lose their passports to the realm of childhood, and who have made the lives of their readers all the richer for their magic.

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If you’d like to get to know these remarkable personalities better, why not have a listen to the biographies curated in a brand-new hoopla audiobook collection: 2020 APL Minds Behind the Magic Audio? Here, you’ll find portraits of imaginations born out of the crisis of World War I in books like A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and the Great War by Joseph Loconte or Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth by John Garth. (To enjoy a glimpse of Tolkien’s own parenting approach, you might also take a look at his playful Letters from Father Christmas, a richly-illustrated ebook available on hoopla.)

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In a similar vein, Louisa May Alcott’s life and writing were undoubtedly shaped by crisis: childhood privation and the Civil War loom large in her biographies. For a well-rounded study, try Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography; to observe the strong mother-daughter bond that shaped Alcott, listen to Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eva LaPlant. 

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In the memoirs of Christopher Robin Milne, we have a different sort of perspective: the complicated influence of famous children’s author A. A. Milne and his works on his own son. While the two-part autobiography (The Enchanted Places and The Path through the Trees) is not all sunshine, it offers some fascinating windows onto Winnie-the-Pooh’s world and its creator. Even more compelling is The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest That Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood, a biography-cum-ramble through rural England.

For further insight into the minds behind the magical worlds of classic children’s literature, have a look at a companion film collection in hoopla, available here.

Bedtime Stories for “Adulting” Fatigue

In times like these, “adulting” is more a necessity than an option. And if you’re feeling somewhat world-weary in consequence, you might take inspiration from one of Boston’s WCRB Classical Radio presenters, who has begun the charming Aurora Bedtime Story Project on Facebook Live and YouTube. Night after quarantined night, you can tune in at 9:30 pm (EST, Sundays-Fridays) to listen yourself into a not-so-grown-up state of wonder and relaxation. On the storytime menu? Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Cricket in Times Square, several Beatrix Potter gems, some Grimm fairy tales, and The Wind in the Willows.

So, in the midst of  this very “adult” crisis, there is still that one, great childhood pleasure available to us: the inestimable comfort of being read to. If you don’t have the freedom in your schedule to tune into live performances, APL’s digital library is here for you 24/7! Our newly-curated hoopla audiobook collection–2020 APL Bedtime Stories for “Adulting” Fatigue–showcases some of the titles mentioned above, along with a number of other classic favorites.

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So, if you’ve been meaning to read The Chronicles of Narnia–or at least The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe–since your fifth-grade classmate raved about it decades ago, now is your chance! Or escape into the wondrous world created by C. S. Lewis’s good friend J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. Or perhaps step into an enchanted Yorkshire realm as you unlock the gate to The Secret Garden. Even if you have read these or the other suggested titles before, it may well be therapeutic to tune in to a tucked-in, ready-for-a-bedtime-story feeling. Happy listening, and sweet dreams!