Salutations from Arizona

revtjb · Post by **revtjb** » March 24th, 2006, 11:59 am

Hello,

My name is Thomas Bernthal and I live just south of Tucson, Arizona (USA).

My wife Angela and I homeschool 5 of our 6 children (the sixth one is only 16 months and not quite ready yet!) My wife does most of the teaching, but I contribute toward special projects, reading stories out loud and I am the resident Spanish consultant (I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico and Puerto Rico for about a year back in my post graduate days - 1989). My wife lived in France for half a year and is semi-fluent in French. She is teaching the children Spanish at the moment, but they also do greek and latin word-etymology studies.

While we use an eclectic approach to homeschooling, classic literature is certainly one of our main thrusts.

This project (LibriVox) is really fantastic and even though I haven't quite had a chance to look through the entire site, I've been impressed with what I have seen so far.

I would love to volunteer for reading. I especially love reading children's classics. Maybe one of you (kayray?) could suggest a project I could jump into to get my feet wet. If I find it technically feasible, I might get some of my older children involved too. One of my 10 year olds, in particular, has a very nice reading voice (he reminds people of Linus reciting the Christmas story from Luke in the Charlie Brown Christmas special).

I don't know how much time I would have for this and I would have to get some technical details in order to make the recordings, but I am excited to give it a try.

Have a wonderful day.

-Tom

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » March 24th, 2006, 12:09 pm

Hi there, great to have you here! And did I hear you mention Spanish? Fancy reading a couple of chapters in our Spanish Cervantes project? :) It's in the Readers Wanted forum.

You may find this useful for recording setup etc: http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/NewbieGuideToRecording

It would be wonderful if your kids could do some recordings - how about Aesops fables in Short works, or the Children's classics collection in Readers Wanted?

Aldark · Post by **Aldark** » March 24th, 2006, 12:11 pm

Welcome aboard Tom!

Gesine wrote:Hi there, great to have you here! And did I hear you mention Spanish? Fancy reading a couple of chapters in our Spanish Cervantes project? It's in the Readers Wanted forum.

Good call Gesine! I was going to suggest the same.

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » March 24th, 2006, 12:13 pm

Oh Tom, and since you're such a wonderfully multilingual household, your wife could read a couple of letters of Les Liaisons Dangereuses if she'd like to... also in Readers Wanted. :)

kayray · Post by **kayray** » March 24th, 2006, 1:39 pm

Hi Tom, glad to have you here!

I have a special place in my heart for homeschooling families -- my son, Henry, is a homeschooler and I was, as well! I hope you will encourage your son to do some reading for us. The Fables are a great way to get your feet wet -- short and sweet. Hmm... looks like the current set of Fables is fully subscribed, but that means that Chip will be starting another set in a few days, so keep an eye on the Short Works section:

http://librivox.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=19

If your son enjoys poetry, maybe he'd like to contribute to the Short Poetry collection. A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is in the public domain, and has lots of goodies -- he can just pick any one he likes, record it, and submit it to the collection. And I'm sure there are other tempting children's poetry collections...

Hmm... it seems we are sadly lacking in Children's Lit in the readers wanted section!

This collection of Junior Classics still has some sections available:
http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1323

I'll try to start a new children's project over the weekend. Any suggestions? Remember, we need to remain in the public domain, so anything you can find on http://gutenberg.org is fair game :)

Happy reading to you and your family!

revtjb · Post by **revtjb** » March 24th, 2006, 3:44 pm

Gesine and kayray:

Thanks for the (very) helpful links. I hadn't found those yet. As a complete newbie to this site, I have been fumbling around trying to figure out exactly how things work, but hadn't quite gotten there.

As for the Don Quixote project - it sounds wonderful, but I think I will allow more native speakers to do that for now. Maybe if I practice a little I could do that in the future.

And as for the children's lit - I'll check out the links you referred. As for suggestions for children's lit, I'm not sure what's been done. If I had found this a couple months ago I might have suggested Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates (Mary Mapes Dodge), but alas I'm thinking Spring these days so it doesn't sound as appealing. But I'll give it some thought. As soon as I figure out the protocol around here, I'll make the appropriate suggestions in the proper places...

Thanks again.

-Tom

kri · Post by **kri** » March 24th, 2006, 9:38 pm

revtjb wrote: As for the Don Quixote project - it sounds wonderful, but I think I will allow more native speakers to do that for now. Maybe if I practice a little I could do that in the future.

I'm not nearly a native French speaker, and I'm reading for Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I'm having to take it in small pieces (which I don't NORMALLY do) but it's coming along

revtjb wrote:As for suggestions for children's lit, I'm not sure what's been done.

This page will show you everything we've completed, and everything we're working on currently.