First chapter books

Notes From the Reading Nook: November 7

Good morning ☀️

Have you considered lately that you are doing so much better than you think you are?

Wherever you were at this time last year, you’re not there anymore.

Whoever you were ten or six or even two months ago, you’ve changed.

Whatever you’re working on or walking through, you’re making progress. (And it doesn’t have to be perfect.)

You are constantly evolving. The past is over and done and you can’t change it anyway, so let it go.

You don’t have to believe in anything positive; you don’t have to force yourself to get there (or anywhere). The only path is through.

And you really are doing marvelously.

Even tripping down a road is going forward.

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• Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus (this is our current audiobook in the car)

• Construction People, selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins* (this is our current poetry at bedtime)

If you have a construction fanatic, definitely check out this book — and my mini issue from April: Children’s books about construction.

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📫 Questions from you

A few months ago, I got two emails close together, both with similar questions.

The first was from a dad:

I was wondering if you have some recommendations for chapter books for younger children. My son is 4.5 and is still in prime picture book age, but also is hankering for some longer read-alouds. We’ve done some early chapter books (Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel, Henry and Mudge by Cynthia Rylant) but I have found that he just wants to finish those in one sitting, the chapters are too short (as read aloud that is, I see those as wonderful future books when he is a reader himself).

When did you make the transition to longer books with your kids and what weres ome of their favorites?

💌 Dear Hankering:

Chapter books for younger children is one of my favorite topics.

Sometimes people get confused by “early chapter books,” which are meant for emerging readers and thus need to be fairly simple (that’s what Henry and Mudge and Frog and Toad are), and plain old “chapter books that a more skilled reader is going to read aloud to young children, early in their lives.”

It seems like a nitpicky distinction, but it’s actually really important — little ones often aren’t ready for the content in, say, middle-grade novels, but they also need to hear language that’s much more complex than what’s in those early readers.

To be clear, we never “made the transition” in the sense that we stopped reading picture books — my kids are 7 and 9yo now, and we still read both picture books and chapter books every day. (Yes, including my 9yo — I will do this for as long as they will let me. Picture books are really important.)

I started reading aloud chapter books when my kiddos were 6yo (kindergarten) and 3.5yo. This wasn't a huge leap for us, as I’d been reading them longer stories (anywhere from 2-5 pages, without pictures of any kind) over breakfast since both were babies. That built up their habit of attention and tolerance for listening without needing images. And I always did this when they were eating — so I wasn’t expecting them to listen while sitting on my lap staring at a page full of nothing but words, which also helped. 

The first handful of books we started with were: 

• The Gingerbread Rabbit by Randall Jarrell (I reviewed this in my 2023 special edition on Easter but it’s not an Easter book, it merely features a rabbit)

• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

• Two Times the Fun by Beverly Cleary (I reviewed this one in my very first issue)

• Dory Fantasmagory (issue No. 3) 

• Lady Lollipop by Dick King-Smith (issue No. 7). 

From left to right: Jenny and the Cat Club, The Stories Julian Tells, and The Magic Finger

I also highly recommend:

• Our Friend Hedgehog by Lauren Castillo (issue No. 5) 

• Jenny and the Cat Club by Esther Averill

• The Stories Julian Tells by Ann Cameron (issue No. 35)

• My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Gannett Stiles

• The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl

• Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke

My advice is to pick one, don’t overthink it too much, and start. Set your son up to succeed — i.e., let him eat or build Legos or do something else with his hands while you’re reading — but you will know pretty quickly if he can handle it. (For context, I only added chapter books at bedtime this past year. Lying in bed doing nothing but listening is a skill that takes longer to develop, in my experience.)

If his attention flags, don’t worry about it — go back to reading longer picture books (Bill Peet books are great, period, but especially for building attention for longer stories while still being fully illustrated) and try again in a few months.

The second question, from one of my dearest Substack-turned-real friend, Jessica Wilen of A Cup of Ambition:

My daughter is finally (finally!) starting to show a real interest in books and I was wondering if you had any suggestions. She’s 5 and not into princesses/unicorns/etc — she’s obsessed with Dory Fantasmagory by Abby Hanlon. Do you have any suggestions in that vein? She has a great sense of humor and loves funny books. Her other interests include art, playing doctor/anything related to medicine, space, and animals.

I tried the Zoey and Sassafras series by Asia Citro with her and she wasn’t into it. I think it was a little old for her and I’ll try again later. Mercy Watson by Kate DiCamillo is another one she likes.

(She’s just starting to learn to read, so I’m mostly looking for titles we can read to her, but if you have suggestions for very early readers, I’ll take those too.)

Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated! Thank you!

💌 Dear Jessica,

My kids both started on Go, Dog, Go! by P.D. Eastman and a leveled series called First Little Readers — we started with A and went up sequentially, stopping with D (though the continue up to L, I believe). They are formulaic — that’s the point — but they help give the earliest readers some confidence, and the variety of topics within each set is wide enough that both my kids found at least 5-6 books (out of 25) that they wanted to read over and over again.

Then we graduated to the Biscuit books by Alyssa Satin Capucilli, because even if a kiddo is struggling with every dang word, there is a “woof woof” on every other page to keep them going 😂

I also think the classics in this genre remain excellent, when she’s ready for the next step up: every Frog and Toad book, plus Mouse Soup and Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel; all the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.

There are a couple of one-off titles I like — The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat by Nurit Kalrin — and series: Mac and Cheese by Sarah Weeks, Layla and the Bots by Vicky Fang, and the Penny books by Kevin Henkes.

It’s hard to live up to Dory Fantasmagory — I’d be hard-pressed to find a series that has made me and my girls laugh harder — but here are a few read-alikes that are Dory-adjacent: 

• JoJo Makoons: The Used-to-Be Best Friend by Dawn Quigley (first in a series)

• Bink & Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee (this is kind of a cross between a picture book and early chapter book — it’s hard to describe) 

• Absolutely Alfie and the Furry, Purry Secret by Sally Warner

• Henrietta, There's No One Better by Martine Murray (first in a series) 

• The Tashi books by Anna Fienberg — they are standalone titles, but if you search Amazon, they sell one that appears to have jammed them all into one volume

• The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren (both my kids love this book, which I reviewed in issue No. 29 and its follow-up, which I read to them when my eldest was right around your daughter’s age — anything Astrid Lindgren is very much in the spirit of Dory F., see also Lotta On Troublemaker Street) 

• George’s Marvelous Medicine, both by Roald Dahl

• The No. 1 Carspotter by Atinuke

I hope this helps!

Sarah

Do you have early chapter book recommendations for your fellow subscribers? Any titles that were a huge hit with your little ones just starting to transition to listening to longer books, or starting out reading on their own? Let us know!

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ICYMI

Last week I published my 2023 special edition on Thanksgiving. It has some really excellent titles (that are hopefully new to you!), so be sure to check it out. (Along with the rest of this newsletter right now, it’s free for everyone.)

Read good books and take good care 😘
Sarah

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