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Reading to Children

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
Arrr! Of course!

Planning on it, at least. Haven't met Silver yet though. Just a chapter a night.

Nice!

By the way, Project Guttenberg has illustrations from an old edition of Treasure Island in the HTML version of the story. The kids might like to see those.
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
Good to know.

I really want to see if they enjoy the story without illustration first, as an experiment. Hopefully, Stevenson & I can work together and make it come to life.
 

KC Trae Becker

Troubadour
Some good recommendations here. I'll add:
Two old series I loved as a kid. The first books of each at least held up to my kids
The Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander
The Dark Is Rising Series, by Susan Cooper

Some more recent series:
The Spirit Animals series is very kid friendly. Even though there are multiple authors the consistency is pretty good.
The Heroes Guide to saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy is the first book in a series that is a humorous romp through fairytales.

And a recent stand alone book I liked:
The Night Fairy, by Laura Amy Schlitz
 

MineOwnKing

Maester
My kids are 8 and 5.

I've tried Treasure island, The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.

My kid's complain before I finish the first sentence. They are just not ready for it yet.

Teen Titans wins the day.

We are trying Farty Marty now....but only my 8 year old is able to stay awake long enough.

My son just finished 2nd grade and he is just beginning to read and type on his own.

He performed his very first google search last week and I stumbled upon it when he wasn't looking.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

HOW TO BE A PROFESSIONAL CRAPS PLAYER IN VEGAS IN 10 MINUTES!

Wow, times have really changed.
 
Hmm. Some of those sound a little advanced for a four year old.

If they like the Lion, the witch and the wardrobe you've got the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia - I bought the boxed set for my nephews, and now they've stopped reading to my grand niece (she's teenaging, and my grandnephew was one this week, so is not yet very word profound. I lover TH White's 'The sword in the stone', niece's copy of Watership Down is totally loose leaf by now (I don't think the original binding was very solid) and I had a grandfather who was very 'animal inclined', so I was read the Gerald Durrell books from very early, and loved them but that might have been the performance as much as the (rather grown up) content and humour.

Perhaps the Alice books? I know they're now being rejected for Freudian elements, but I was never upset by them.

Do they have any special likes? I remember my slightly younger grandniece being ready to accept anything with horses in it, and was being read 'Black Beauty' incredibly early (Mind, I was brought up by siamese cats, so was wild about a book called 'Tai Lu talking', which nobody else has ever heard of).
 

KC Trae Becker

Troubadour
Talking Animal fantasies are more age appropriate if your kids like animals. They thrilled me as a child with their get-in-the-heads-of-animals imagination stretch often associated with fantasy and sci fi.

Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien
One Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith (I was just today strongly reminded of
the dog's Twilight Bark while listening to Terry Pratchet's Long Earth War and the
troll's long call.)
The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling

Watership Down, by Richard Adams was not originally written for kids, but has been enjoyed by many of them.

There's also the Oz series, by L. Frank Baum
 
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Inkspell, Inkheart, and Inkdeath are good fantasy books that would be age appropriate. The author is Cornillia Funke (I may have misspelled her first name). They were some if my favorites when I was younger, particularly the second one Inkspell.
 
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