Posted on 06/19/2008 7:10:37 PM PDT by incredulous joe
FReeps have such great taste! So, I thought I would put this out there.
One of my favorite things to do during the summer months is read to my children before they go to sleep. Actually, I do this year round, but particularly enjoy reading to them during the summer months. At times we get carried away with some of the great children’s lit available ~ with Mom finally coming up tho the bedrooms at 10:30 to shut down the evening's activities. At which point we may have to get real quiet and me straining my eyes.
It’s great to have a book that you can’t put down and not have to get up for school the following day!
As the kids have gotten older I’ve found that there is a lot of great stuff out there that we can read.
I thought that I would ask my FReeper friends what they may have read with their kids or grandkids and really enjoyed ~ thought funny or profound.
My son will be 10 and my little girl is going to be 7 soon. They’re interested in a lot of different things, but it’s sort of a key to meet somewhere in between with them on the stories that we read. My son could go for a steady diet of military stories and C.S Lewis books, but my daughter does not particularly favor those, though she will listen in.
Here are a few that were very much enjoyed;
“Flush” by Carl Hiasson
“Because of Winn-Dixie” by Kate DiCamilo
“The House of 60 Father’s” by Meindert De Jong
“Redwall” by Brian Jacques
What do you recommend?
Thanks. Lots of great suggestions. Mrs. Joe is off at the library processing my orders right now. I have a couple of the suggestions coming in via Amazon, as well.
Summer is too short to be reading mediocre lit for kids when there is so much out there.
By next September my peeps will be so different than they are today ~ it’s so important not to waste these precious days!
Thanks very much to both of you! I have three of the four kids involved in the library’s summer reading program and they are reading like crazy! They even have a program for the adults (I’m enrolled too).
I told the oldest if she keeps her reading up, I’ll hand her the first installment of Harry Potter soon...that’s an incentive for her!
And some more, because I can’t help myself:
For some reason, when I was ten, I couldn’t get enough children’s books with jewish characters. My faves were: “Witch of 4th Street: And Other Stories” by Myron Levoy, “All-of-a-kind Family” by Sydney Taylor (this is a series), “Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Carp in the Bathtub” by Barbara Cohen, and “The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia” by Esther Hautzig.
I also enjoyed British children’s literature- the aforementioned Arthur Ransome novels, Alan Garner’s “Elidor”, all of E. Nesbit’s fantasies, Enid Blyton (difficult to find in this country), and Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” sequence.
Special mention must go to the books of Americans Edward Eager (”Half Magic” and many other fun fantasies) and Eleanor Estes (all good, but if “The Witch Family” doesn’t become your daughter’s favourite book, I’ll eat my pointy hat).
I’ll try and stop now.
Except I forgot to mention “The Egypt Game”. You have to read this one.
Oh! And “The Westing Game”! How could I forget....
(someone shut me up...darnit darnit...haven’t worked in a children’s library for a decade...must...stop....)
The books by Rosemary Sutcliffe.
And “My Father’s Dragon”! Your seven year old will love it! And “The Just-So Stories” by Rudyard Kipling is the most fantastic read-aloud book ever.
And don’t let your boy grow up without reading Tintin!
And nobody’s mentioned Pippi Longstocking, or Mrs Piggle Wiggle.
And if your boy likes mysteries Henry Winterfield’s “Detectives in Togas” is a classic!
Oh, and put D’Aulaires myth books in the bathroom- any of’em- Greek, Roman, Norse.
If you have more than one bathroom, that is. You may never see your kids again, but at least you’ll know they’re being well rounded
For younger girls there are Jill Barklem and Tasha Tudor's books.
If your children’s library has older stock be sure to look for these out of print classics:
Miss Pickerell (A series, this lady can do anything)
“City Under the Back Steps” and “Captain Apple’s Ghost” by Evelyn Sibley Lampman
“Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery” and “Spellbinders in Suspense” (Great short story anthologies, very fondly remembered)
Hmmm...Hey! “Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet” is still in print! So are “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” and “The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles”! And “The Castle in the Attic” by Elizabeth Winthrop!
And don’t forget: Ten years is not too young for Sherlock Holmes :)
My son howled through Pippi Longstocking!
I remember Miss Pickerell from first grade. The sister that taught my class used to read it to us, but only if we were good.
I als remember a teacher in 4th reading “Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors” I thought this was great and have looked aroud for it, but it seems to be out of print.
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned Homer Price- does no one eat donuts anymore?
John Bellairs! “The House with a Clock in Its Walls”! Classic!
Thanks for starting this thread.
My daughter’s report card came home in the mail today and it included the reading list for the summer. Many of the books on the list have been included in this thread as recommended by other FReepers, several of which I had never heard. So this thread is extremely helpful!!!
Every book she has already picked from the list has been mentioned here at least once!!!
Check this one out, sometimes it isn’t pretty but overall a great book with good life lessons: “A Day No Pigs Would Die”
by Robert Newton Peck
In lieu of that, "The Chronicles of Narnia." If you can find this edition...
...buy it. It presents the stories in the order Lewis meant them to be read, starting with, "The Magician's Nephew," rather than the order in which they were written. Furthermore, it has the original pen and ink illustrations from the original printing. If Sci-Fi is to their liking, Lewis's Space Trilogy is also very good.
Ooooo man-why would anyone want a kid’s first reading of the Chronicles of Narnia to be in internal chronological order? Way to suck the mystery out of a series....
Wow, how did you get access to the collection I had as a kid?
Seriously, those out of print books were the best... I love Homer Price. Had the rhyme from the story where the whole town gets the same song stuck in their heads going through mine just yesterday actually.
Maybe because that's the way the author intended them to be read?
From Wikipedia:
To make the case for his suggested order, Gresham quoted Lewis' reply to a letter from an American fan in 1957 who was having an argument with his mother about the order:
“I think I agree with your order [i.e. chronological] for reading the books more than with your mother’s. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.” (Dorsett & Mead 1996)
In the HarperCollins adult editions of the books (2005), the publisher asserts Lewis' preference for the numbering they adopted in a notice on the copyright page:
Although The Magician's Nephew was written several years after C.S. Lewis first began The Chronicles of Narnia, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. HarperCollins is happy to present these books in the order which Professor Lewis preferred.
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