Recommended Website:
Archive.org’s Old Time Radio Collection: You Are There
Age Range: 10 and up. (Family members of all ages can enjoy listening to these broadcasts, but older students will probably have a better level of comprehension and retention.)
“You Are There” is a series of about seven dozen or so radio broadcasts which aired from 1947 to 1950, each about half an hour long. More than 70 episodes are archived. Each episode is a fictional news report “live from the scene” of an important event in history.
As the reporter conducts interviews with famous people (and not-so-famous people) and you hear realistic sound effects, you can imagine that you have been transported back in time – and history is unfolding right before your very ears.
Listen in as Julius Caesar, Socrates, Captain Kidd, Maximilian, Joan of Arc, John Wilkes Booth, and others meet their end.
Re-live the famous battle at Thermopylae, the Alamo, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the storming of the Bastille, the battle of Gettysburg, the battle of Hastings, the fall of Troy, the defeat of Sitting Bull, and other exciting conflicts.
Witness the rise and fall of great leaders, the signing of pivotal documents and treaties, and important uprisings, trials, and discoveries.
Archive.org makes all of this available for free. When you reach this site, you may wish to wait a little while for the main page to load completely; a gray play menu box will appear near the upper right of the screen. You can click on any title to play it directly from your browser.
In addition to legally and freely listening to these broadcasts online, you can also right-click on the titles to download them to your computer for listening later, then load them onto an mp3 player such as an ipod, or even burn them onto mp3-format or audio-format CD’s.
Cozy up on the couch with the family for a delightful listening adventure, or take this show on the road by Carschooling!
If you have trouble accessing these files online, or if downloading and burning them onto CD’s is more effort than you can spare, you will be delighted to learn that you can purchase pre-burned CD’s of these broadcasts, in mp3 format, from Living Books for the Ears, which we featured on ClickSchooling in 2005. (You can read more here.)
Enjoy! :)
DID YOU MISPLACE A ClickSchooling Review? Do you need to find an educational website – fast! Visit the ClickSchooling archives at: http://www.homefires.com/clickschool/archive.asp.
