Wanted to share a nice resource of classical poems and stories for children. Some of them would probably be for older children, but can be adapted.
Here is from creators of the project:
"The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States. This includes all works first published before 1923. The period from 1880 or so until 1922 offers a wealth of material in all categories, including: Nursery Rhymes, Fables, Folk Tales, Myths, Legends and Hero Stories, Literary Fairy Tales, Bible Stories, Nature Stories, Biography, History, Fiction, Poetry, Storytelling, Games, and Craft Activities.
We offer these resources at no charge and grant permission to individuals to print copies for personal and educational uses. The texts are formatted so that attractive copies can be printed easily, in larger type for younger readers and smaller type for older ones, with illustrations included where possible. Teachers and parents can make use of the readers that are already available, or they can construct their own readers by selecting stories from the existing pool.
We hope that by offering these online texts that more of today’s children will become familiar with the works of Padraic Colum, Howard Pyle, Andrew Lang, and James Baldwin, that were read so widely just a few generations ago.
To guide parents and teachers in their selection of stories for particular children, we plan to include suggested age ranges for each of the stories, both the age at which children first enjoy hearing the story read to them and the age when they can typically read the story to themselves. In addition we look forward to compiling anthologies of stories and lists of books suitable for each age."
Here are some of our favorites:
http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=burt&book=poems&story=_contents – nice selection of poems, many of these we were able to read and enjoy with 2-3 year old
http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=baldwin&book=fifty&story=_contents
http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=baldwin&book=people&story=_contents – These are by J Baldvin, and are excellent short stories about famous people and historical figures, as well as different interesting events through history, we read them as part of our history lessons.
http://www.mainlesson.com/main/displayarticle.php?article=synge – The story of the world series. I was looking for simple history book, that I can start using with my 3 year old. We just started this one, and so far we like it!
Plus there are many more there.
All of these are re-layedout ( not just a simple txt file, as with many other depositories of out of copyright books, available on the internet), so they are really easy to print a story ( or a poem) at a time. That what we do.
There is also another cool option – you can order a nice print of many of them through their “Yesterday’s Classics” printing house for very reasonable prices.