One of the very best gifts you can give your child is the love of reading. Reading helps build vocabulary, broadens their horizons and imaginations, and can calm little minds before sleep. Reading also helps to strengthen the emotional bonds between you and your child when you engage in a ritual of reading, such as reading bedtime stories together every night.
But there are so many children’s books out there with colorful illustrations and bold covers, and titles that cover a mind-boggling array of topics these days. It can be overwhelming to know where to even start – how do you select good books with so many options?
Start building your child’s reading library with some of these children’s favorites:
1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar
By Eric Carle
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of childhood’s simplest but most beloved stories, with its fun mixed-media collages, and a history that dates back to 1969. The baby caterpillar eats his way through chocolate cake, ice cream, a pickle, cheese, salami, a lollipop, a piece of pie, a sausage, a cupcake and more, all of which are great interactive fun for little fingers to poke through the holes he leaves behind in each on his way to his metamorphosis into a beautiful butterfly.
2. My Very First Mother Goose
Edited by Iona Opie
Introduce your little one to more than 60 nursery rhymes, illustrated with various fun animal characters. Enjoy this lovely book and have hours of fun together with the classic sing-song language of nursery rhymes, many of which you will know well from your own childhood, as well as some that are lesser widely-known.
3. Goodnight Moon
By Margaret Wise Brown
It seems that by the end of the toddler years, every parent knows this book forward and backward by memory. The tale of the young rabbit saying goodnight to all the things outside his window as well as in his room is a great story perfect for settling your children into bed at night. It has both black and white drawings as well as colored illustrations which will delight young eyes as their eyelids grow heavier as sleep approaches, both for the little bunny, and for them.
4. Guess How Much I Love You
By Sam McBratney
One of the only good ways to try to one-up someone else is to learn how to love and express it as much as possible. In another tale with a young bunny in it, that’s just what this bunny and his father lovingly do with each other in Guess How Much I Love You. Beautiful watercolor illustrations depict the sweet story about the two family members declaring how big their love for each other is.
5. Are You My Mother?
By P.D. Eastman
A baby bird falls out of the nest and takes off on an epic quest to find his mother. Is it the kitten, or the hen, the dog or the cow? None of them are his mother! Take your little one on the great journey with the baby bird to find his mother – and use the story as a good teaching point for what to do if your child is ever suddenly accidentally separated from you!
Join us again soon for more books for building your child’s reading library!
