The Enchanted Empire is a series of twenty-four audio stories aimed at children between the ages of three and seven. Each story is linked to a particular alphabet sound, offering a broad and rich language experience.

What the stories do

Help developing minds hear the initial sounds of words and recognise alliteration (words that start with the same sound i.e. Sally saw six swans.)

Enhance listening skills

Promote imagination

When to listen

Any time, any place, but they can be especially useful to occupy and entertain on short or long car journeys - each story is between four and seven minutes long.

The stories are meant to be shared and enjoyed which will promote pleasure, interest and motivation.

Background

Over the years children have become more reliant on visual gratification; as a result listening skills and imagination have decreased. By listening to stories with no pictorial clues, children will awaken these dormant skills.

When children start to read, they learn to recognise the alphabet sounds. By listening and discriminating between different initial sounds of words, children can get a better understanding of words before moving on to recognising the written letters.

We have developed a series of learning resources to go with these stories. We recommend that parents take the time to listen to the stories with their children, and to go through the activities together. Nothing beats parent-child interaction!

On the right you can hear samples from some of the stories.