Children's summer reading list

 

Today I thought I’d share with you the children’s writers that we are digging right now with our son. Reading is such a pleasurable experience any time of the year but now, with spring in the air, it seems a nice time to explore some new titles and authors to spice up your reading routine with your children. Most of these books have rhyming in them—important for vocabulary development.

 

Virginia Lee Burton: my husband brought Katy and the Big Snow home three years ago, and it remains a timeless favorite with my son. Her heroes and heroines are objects, often ones that are now considered old and obsolete. Her books typically have an underlying theme about modernization and industrialization, and the place that these outdated objects have in the world.

 

Julia Donaldson: anything that Donaldson writes is an instant favorite in our house. The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo’s Child, The Snail and the Whale and Tiddler never seem to get back onto our son’s bookshelf. 

 

Claire Freedman: Pirates Love Underpants came into our home as a gift from one of my oldest girlfriends who now lives in London. For those of us here in North America, underpants are underwear. Every book in her series has something to do with underwear and creatures battling for them.

 

C.S Lewis: Thanks to a friend who introduced me to The Well Trained Mind by Susan Bauer, we’ve really gotten into audio books during the pandemic. Bauer, one of the most respected authorities on homeschooling, wrote this classic decades ago, and it remains the go-to for homeschooling families in the United States. She stresses the importance of reading and listening to classics which expose children to vocabulary at a very early age. At the end of each age chapter she puts together a list of books your children should have read to them. We have made it to Maine and back over 6 times during the pandemic with the help of C.S Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. We get them from our local library and go for the British versions which feature famous British stage and screen actors. The multitude of accents they perform for the characters is out of this world. We fell so in love with one character, a valiant mouse named Reepicheep, that we named our second car after him.

 

Jonathan London: his Froggy series touches upon every milestone a child will face, only this is a frog with his other animal friends. My favorite is Froggy’s First Sleepover which had me stitches.

 

Dr. Seuss: although I adore just about any Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who is probably my all time favorite. An endearing story about an elephant who embarks on a mission to save the microscopic town of Whoville perched on a fleck of dust on a flower.

 

Happy reading!