Audio homeschool

I know I am way behind the times here so I'm a little afraid to post this as other homeschoolers and teachers will say they have been doing this for years. But I have wanted this for a long time and it finally was done today.

When I taught in the classroom, I had tons of cassette tapes and each morning much preparation was in setting each tape to the right Shurley Jingle or patriotic song etc. to sing. By the time I began homeschooling I had updated to CDs. But up until last school year each morning we began by putting in one CD after the other doing our whole list of "memory songs". Once Lamb 2 began therapy this was the first to go in our schedule, we just didn't have time to go through a bunch of CDs. So we didn't do very much Latin in 2014.

Last spring I talked to a brand new homeschooler that was pulling her kids out of a classical Christian school here and homeschooling this fall. Her biggest fear was how to cover most of the subjects daily or almost daily when her young boys would lose their attention. I told her it wasn't as hard as it seemed-we spent an average of 5 minutes on each CD that we do and for some subjects that is all we do for that subject. I don't have the Lambs do any writing for Latin, we just try to do it with the CD daily.

We got an iPad last Christmas and I got the idea to make a playlist with all our educational CDs. The playlist has 301 songs and is 358 minutes-just by thinking of all the poetry and songs that we use often in homeschool. A couple were downloads I paid a couple of dollars for a few years ago but have never used with the Lambs-now they are easily accessible. It is going to be so nice to just click on the correct song and it is all ready for us daily instead of finding the correct CD and then the correct track.

Here is what is in my playlist to begin:
Song School Latin and Prima Latina and Lingua Angelica
Math U See Songs
Andrew Pudewa's Linguistic Development Poetry Series
Geography Songs
Sing the Faith CD
Some Science songs from Ellen McHenry
The Presidents Song from SueDickson.com (this was a download that I was happy to purchase, I used this in my classroom but only had a cassette tape)
Wee Sing America (patriotic songs)

I do want to add some more Bible verse memory (probably from CPH Sunday School CDs) and hymns (probably from St. Paul's Lutheran, Fort Wayne). I'm sure once we begin school I will think of others to add too.

Since the Lambs also use the iPad, I will keep all my CDs for backup and a list of what is on my playlist in case they do something to my playlist. I think this will not only save us time, but also save wear and tear on our CDs that we use daily. The CDs are there if we ever need to make a new playlist. Perhaps we will also do more of these songs daily since they are so easy to access now. I also like that we can easily take the iPad with us. When we lived in MN we often did these CDs on long drives or even short drives the 7 miles into town. Since we have lived in ID we haven't done that much. But if we drive across town we can do a couple of these on the iPad or if we have to wait somewhere we can do a couple; I can think of the possibilities of using 5 or 10 minutes wisely with this.