I am sure that many of you are having similar problems, so I thought I would pose the question here…we go to the library weekly, check out 25-30 books, and buy WAY too many books to count…Today I sought out the assistance of a librarian asking for her help in locating books appropriate for a child of 26 months at a level that will keep her interested, challenge her a bit, and still be appropriate…
Absolute dead end…I think she most definitely didn’t believe that I needed something so advanced and made a snide comment about pushy mothers and had I tried ‘War and Peace’ to her yet…
I think we must own literally thousands of children’s books, but with the exception of a few favorites or fads she goes through, A will only read them 3-5 timesMAX…but there are books she hasn’t seen in a year that if I try to get out, she will tell me the basic plot, or say, no, I don’t like the dog in that one…
This must be a common complaint for parents with early reading kids, and she reads so quickly that I can barely keep up…but the themes are too advanced in the older books, and I spend WAY too much explaining what things are…great for EK but not so good for pure enjoyment
Also, so many books for older levels involve fantasy and fairy tales and she is NOT into that…she doesn’t watch any television, so is fairly sheltered about things like princesses and the like…
So far the beginning science books like ‘Lets look and See Science’ level 1 and 2 are what she demands over and over. She likes the MathStart Books and the Oscar and the…books another member recommended…we have yet to find but a few Usborne books she didnt like, but own a tremendous amount of them…She doesn’t like cartoony characters in books either…I would like to interest her in something besides informational books about animals, Science, and Math!
Anybody have any ideas? I am getting a bit desperate as we are going through anywhere from 10-20 books daily…
Thanks for any ideas!
Have you tried some of Beverly Cleary books? I am not sure what level she is at but we just read, “Two times the fun.” I think its pretty suitable for any age group. While my son isn’t reading very well yet, he likes me to read him small chapter books. (We just started an accelerated reading program.) Hope that helps.
One thing I should add! Book ideas from other countries are especially welcome as I truly believe they are written at a much higher level than those in the US…for example, at the bookstore this weekend my daughter picked up a Sight Reader about bugs, supposedly designed for 2nd/3rd graders, sat down and read the entire thing out loud! I absolutely cannot believe a two year old can read at a proper 7/8 year old level with complete comprehension! Yet while we were in the UK at Christmas I found younger books, like Julia Donaldson books, that introduced her to a lovely new style of writing and some fantastic new vocabulary…
What a wonderful librarian, the way she is able to see and foster talent…moving on…While I do not have your problem yet, I agree that it can be difficult to find books. Our current favourites are:
Dragon Stew by Steve Smallman
Penguin by Polly Dunbar
It’s Time to Sleep You Crazy Sheep
Any books by Julia Donaldson, Oliver Jeffers, Alison Jay
Oscar and…
Titzer books - Colours, Shapes etc
I’ll search through our books when DD is awake from her nap & add to this list.
At this age I looked at Sonlight’s P3/4 curriculum and read her those books as they started out very short easy stories and worked up to quite long more involved stories. There are a number of fairy stories included in these books, but you could always leave those out if you chose to. You can also look at the books included in the curricula for P4/5 and even the kindergarten curriculum as all the books are good books and do advance quite quickly.
The other homeschool curriculum that has good books is FIAR (five in a row) and before five in a row (BFIAR) and you can get the book lists from their website. These are also all good stories that your child should enjoy.
Tanikat- thanks, I will take a look at the Sonlight sets…we have worked our way much of the Five in a Row set list. Yesterday I bought as many of the Berenstain Book Series as I could find…they have great moral messages attached, and lots of challenging words to practice our phonics…she did not want to read the first one, but I promised if she didn’t like it after two pages we could stop…we went through four of them before bedtime, so maybe there is hope for a bit of non-science yet! Today I went into the living room and she was reading the first page of one by herself, carefully pointing to each word so that her stuffed hen could be sure to see lol
Cokers4life- I have tried to read a couple of Beverly Cleary books to her for Outloud reading time and she strongly objects-it isn’t that the subject matter is too intense, I think she just can’t relate to things like teachers, school, siblings, that sort of thing yet…I can’t wait as these were some of my favorites when I was little! She did let me get through ‘Mouse on a Motorcycle’, although she kept telling me how silly it was!
Se will let me read a bit of Roald Dahl aloud and Shel Silverstein…
Hmmmm, I wonder if she would like a series on real people, sort of biographies and autobiographies of people…anybody know of a good set for the very,very young?
Seastar-
Thanks for the Alison Jay line…I hadn’t seen these and I think she might like them…
At the moment I am using DadDude’s book list. I usually search books from the list through our library online catalog, request them and picking up them whenever ready. when at the library I usually browse shelves with early reader books, I found there some nice ones.
HTH.
Thanks Nadia-
I had found three of these old posts during a search, but DAdDudes list gave me a handful of books we haven’t hit yet! She loves the Little Golden Books, could read them over and over until Mommy was taken away to the loony bin! She loves the MathStart books and we recently found a fantastic set of animal books by Reader’s Digest Families called ‘Little Animal Adventures’ which she loves! At the end are some facts about each animal and she treats this like a prize!
We have recently purchased all of the USborne Anna Milbourne series with four books about a curious penguin called Pipkin. He asks questions like “How Much Is a Million?” and goes on a search…he finds ten fish, 100 penguins grouped in a colony, a thousand snowflakes, and finally his mother shows him a million stars…exactly! There is a large foldout poster at the end with exactly 1 million stars! My husband took it to his university chemistry class because even older students simply can’t visualize this!
In fact, it seems to me that the best thing to do is to put up a list of current favorites…it looks like many of the posts are older, and I hope that others will help out with new ideas! I will work on it tonight!
I’m not at your stage yet & don’t know much about the levels but I don’t think any childhood would be complete without “Topsy &Tim”. I looked on amazon to see if they still existed; they have been republished since my day so their illustrations are a bit modern but I’m sure the content hasn’t changed. (Just btw I heard that they were considering taking ginger pop away from the famous five, can you imagine!)