I am fortunate in that my twins (nearly 4) are indiscriminate. They're happy with practically anything I read to them provided it has pictures and not too many words. They also have never done the "read the same book to us eleventy billion times".
So we go to the library 4 times a week but there's also almost nothing they LOVE love.
That said, here are a few highlights.
They are super into search and find books at the moment. Where's The Unicorn Poo? was popular as was I Spy A Candy Cane (just the right difficulty level for them and they're super into Christmas themes.)
Not exactly "reading" but they love when I draw things for them which they then cut out and colour in. I have absolutely zero drawing skill so Alli Koch's "How to Draw" series has been a life saver as has the Usborne Step-by-step Drawing series.
For more traditional reading we've looked Shhh...We Have A Plan by Chris Haughton which is nice combination of repetition and funny scenarios and "what do you think will happen on the next page"?
Starting School by Jane Godwin is an Aussie inflected take on starting school which they've liked as they've just started Kindy last week.
Sing Me The Summer by Jane Godwin and Alison Lester is another Aussie (though less so) seasonal book which gives them lots of opportunities to go "we did that!"
My twins (nearly 7!) are loyal to Ling and Ting by Graci Lin and were DELIGHTED to discover twins named Double Trouble in Anna Hibiscus this week (definitely a Sarah rec!)
My kids (aged 2 and 5) are obsessed with 'A Roll of the Dice: Enchanted Forest', which is a very simplified choose-your-own-adventure book where you roll a dice and move a counter along a game board to determine how the story plays out. It also has a search-and-find element. The 5-year-old totally understands and loves it... and the 2-year-old really just enjoys the physicality of repeatedly rolling the dice and turning the pages.
My kids are 2 and 4, and both are enamored of the Jonny Duddle "The Pirates Next Door" books - we've read at least one of them a day for the past 6 months, which seems insane to even write. The Magic Tree House books are also becoming firm favorites here, thanks to a tip of yours in a previous newsletter to read longer books aloud to them at times like breakfast or bath time. Now they pull them down a lot and "read" by themselves, even though there are only pictures every few pages.
Not exactly book reading, but rather story-adjacent: they also really love listening to podcasts/stories on spotify, especially in the car. Most of the ones I've found so far have either annoyed me (I'm looking at you, Sheriff Labrador!) or have annoyed them due to quality (home recordings). Would love recommendations from others, if you have any! They have a Toniebox at home that they love, but I don't want to have to take that to and from the car every day.
Does the Toniebox have an app that lets you play your tracks via your phone? I know you can do that with Yoto. That's how we play our Yoto cards in the car.
Audio is reading! Kids are able to listen at a much higher level than they’re able to read (even when they begin reading and become strong readers, this remains true).
Co-sign! My 3rd grader took a minute to master reading words out loud BUT because of her obsession with audiobooks, the comprehension has NEVER slowed her down.
My kids haven't really clicked with the podcast/story format yet so I've stopped trying to force it for a year or so but I thought more of the GoKidGo series were pretty good. Sam Archer, Third Grade Detective, Snoop & Sniffy, Whale of a Tale.
On the Epic app, we listen to the Boxcar Children books on any drive longer than 30 minutes. There's a ton of thematic stories and we can always find an appropriate match to the activity we're doing (for example, Sunday we drove 45 min to see a basketball game and listened to Boxcar's "The Basketball Mystery").
My 2 and 5 year old adore the Circle Round podcast. Stories are adapted from myths and legends from around the world and are always clever. I enjoy them too! From 15-25 min, they are perfect for car rides.
We are really into the Valentine's books right now--The Day it Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond and Love, Z by Jessie Zima have been popular. My oldest kid has been devouring Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series. And one of my kiddos is really into Dogman at the moment (which is great, he has been a reluctant reader and now he is reading everyday).
We have been on a looooong repetitive journey with the Dory Fantasmagory series. We've read through each of them dozens of times. Luckily they are good and amusing, but would love to find something that my 5 year old loves nearly as much.
Now that she is reading, she's been pulling Elephant & Piggie off the shelf with a lot of frequency because she can read it to us which is INCREDIBLE. There has also been a revival of the Frog & Toad books which are so lovely.
My 5 yo is also a huge fan of Dory (so am I!!), Elephant & Piggie, Ramona Quimby (possibly because her name is Ramona but who can say!), Charlotte's Web, she looooved Charlie & the Chocolate Factory/Matilda, and can't get enough of Henry & Mudge. We're currently reading this, too--it's BEAUTIFUL: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250799111/thewondrouswonders/
My seven-year-old is also obsessed with the dog man! I have to pull the book out of his hands at bedtime. They are not my favorite books, but I love that they have made him fall in love with reading. We saw the movie on Sunday and I thought it was really good actually. Besides that I’m reading a SpongeBob mystery out loud to him, and my four-year-old is obsessed with a Bluey book and dragons love tacos.
I thought the Dogman movie was surprisingly good! Since my 8 yo has been reading them alone more the last 2 years I had forgotten some of the more poignant moments. I especially loved the scene with lil Petey and Petey looking at the stars. And I take them out of his hands at bedtime too.
My daughter (7) and I are reading Millicent Quibb by Kate McKinnon and absolutely loving it. I've listened to some of the audiobook, too, and it is outstanding!
Both kids (7 and 4) have started listening to Captain Underpants Wonderbooks on the weekends when they have sleepovers in each other's rooms and they're loving that ☺️
My 7yo is a HUGE Lewis Hamilton fan. A couple nights ago, we finished "Racing Legends: Lewis Hamilton" by Maurice Hamilton (no relation, other than both being in the Formula 1 sphere), and, even though I already knew it, Lewis Hamilton is just a stand-up guy, and I'm so thankful my son landed on a good role model. I always scoffed at that sports-stars-as-role-model thing, but now that I have a sports enthusiast for a son, I get it.
And last night, my 4yo daughter and I read "World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney", which I'm pretty sure I got from a recommendation here, and we COULD NOT STOP giggling at the afterword from one of her sons because he mentioned an old saying of Cooney's: "Kids are like pancakes. The first few don't always turn out so well." We giggled, then we belly-laughed, calmed down, looked at each, and started all over again. Several times. It was joyous! So, thank you.
My almost 2 year old is asking for Mel Fell by Cory Tabor multiple times per day. We've also both been enjoying the original Little Bear series. It's simple enough that he understands most if not all the words and I grew up on the tv show so it feels like a warm hug to me.
On another note, good to see your response to "chat." I just did a poll about it on my newsletter, as Substack sent me an email about my "declining numbers" (!) and suggested I add it. Ugh. I've been heartened to see my readers agree with my thoughts on this.
I do love the comments and the interaction there/here :) So here we are.
Happy reading! I miss my days of reading with my boys. Enjoy every minute of it! My youngest moved out January 1. But came around to borrow books last week :)
Wow, I needed this quote right now: "(As Laura Lippman wrote in her most recent newsletter: “I hope for the best, and when I’m wrong, I’m disappointed, but I never regret having been hopeful. The way I see it, being hopeful reduces the number of hours one spends being miserable.” 100%. Here we are, despite it all — what a gift, and let us not forget that.)"
I have teenagers, but I still read some of the picture books we used to read together on my own (ha.) Especially in winter, I love to pull out some of our favorites. I'd have to say my very favorite was The Tomten and The Fox, a close second would be Seven Silly Eaters (we made the cake too.) Other quirky tales my kids got a kick out of were the Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr series and the Flicka, Ricka, Dicka books (these are by Swedish writer Maj Lindman) -- these could get a little weird, scary but my littles loved them and learned so much from these simple stories.
My daughter and I just started a nostalgic journey with my Series Of Unfortunate Events series. She’s loving it, and so am I. It’s amazing to watch her read big words that I would assume she’d need help with. So excited to read them all with her 🫶🏻
We're doing the Lemony Snicket audiobooks now (my 8yo 3rd grader is SUPER INTO IT and my 4yo pre-K-er likes it whenever Sunny makes noises) and I'm actually loving them too. I missed it as a kid (probably would have been too dark for me?) but it's perfect for my kid. Just about to finish The Austere Academy (#5) and wondering when it'll be safe to try the Netflix series or the movie? Looks like there are some pretty big spoilers for later things (I also do not want to be spoiled). Any advice? (Other than keep reading! Best way to avoid spoilers!)
We tried the movie but she just doesn’t care enough to sit still long enough to watch it. My girl is 7/in second grade. She loves the books though! We’re on the second one now. I loved this series as a kid. It is still probably as dark as I will go in my reading 😂😂 please give me all the sunshine 😂
Hahaha, same. My 8yo is loving the indignity of kids knowing better than adults and adults being incompetent/not listening when the kids are RIGHT. Also the punishments they have to go through are comically horrible - but it's been good in moments of tension when I ask him to <gasp> put away his laundry or help pack his lunch ...we can laugh about how Violet/Klaus would feel if they got to do those things. He's also taken to calling it a "Lemony Snickett Day" if he felt like nobody listened to him at school and he's grumpy about it. Yay fiction!!!
I am fortunate in that my twins (nearly 4) are indiscriminate. They're happy with practically anything I read to them provided it has pictures and not too many words. They also have never done the "read the same book to us eleventy billion times".
So we go to the library 4 times a week but there's also almost nothing they LOVE love.
That said, here are a few highlights.
They are super into search and find books at the moment. Where's The Unicorn Poo? was popular as was I Spy A Candy Cane (just the right difficulty level for them and they're super into Christmas themes.)
Not exactly "reading" but they love when I draw things for them which they then cut out and colour in. I have absolutely zero drawing skill so Alli Koch's "How to Draw" series has been a life saver as has the Usborne Step-by-step Drawing series.
For more traditional reading we've looked Shhh...We Have A Plan by Chris Haughton which is nice combination of repetition and funny scenarios and "what do you think will happen on the next page"?
Starting School by Jane Godwin is an Aussie inflected take on starting school which they've liked as they've just started Kindy last week.
Sing Me The Summer by Jane Godwin and Alison Lester is another Aussie (though less so) seasonal book which gives them lots of opportunities to go "we did that!"
My twins (nearly 7!) are loyal to Ling and Ting by Graci Lin and were DELIGHTED to discover twins named Double Trouble in Anna Hibiscus this week (definitely a Sarah rec!)
We also liked Double Trouble. Finding anything with twins is pretty hard!
My kids (aged 2 and 5) are obsessed with 'A Roll of the Dice: Enchanted Forest', which is a very simplified choose-your-own-adventure book where you roll a dice and move a counter along a game board to determine how the story plays out. It also has a search-and-find element. The 5-year-old totally understands and loves it... and the 2-year-old really just enjoys the physicality of repeatedly rolling the dice and turning the pages.
Ooh my kids would LOVE this. Thank you for the recommendation!
My kids are 2 and 4, and both are enamored of the Jonny Duddle "The Pirates Next Door" books - we've read at least one of them a day for the past 6 months, which seems insane to even write. The Magic Tree House books are also becoming firm favorites here, thanks to a tip of yours in a previous newsletter to read longer books aloud to them at times like breakfast or bath time. Now they pull them down a lot and "read" by themselves, even though there are only pictures every few pages.
Not exactly book reading, but rather story-adjacent: they also really love listening to podcasts/stories on spotify, especially in the car. Most of the ones I've found so far have either annoyed me (I'm looking at you, Sheriff Labrador!) or have annoyed them due to quality (home recordings). Would love recommendations from others, if you have any! They have a Toniebox at home that they love, but I don't want to have to take that to and from the car every day.
My kids love Supergreat Kids stories! We listen on Spotify on long drives..
Does the Toniebox have an app that lets you play your tracks via your phone? I know you can do that with Yoto. That's how we play our Yoto cards in the car.
Audio is reading! Kids are able to listen at a much higher level than they’re able to read (even when they begin reading and become strong readers, this remains true).
Co-sign! My 3rd grader took a minute to master reading words out loud BUT because of her obsession with audiobooks, the comprehension has NEVER slowed her down.
My kids haven't really clicked with the podcast/story format yet so I've stopped trying to force it for a year or so but I thought more of the GoKidGo series were pretty good. Sam Archer, Third Grade Detective, Snoop & Sniffy, Whale of a Tale.
On the Epic app, we listen to the Boxcar Children books on any drive longer than 30 minutes. There's a ton of thematic stories and we can always find an appropriate match to the activity we're doing (for example, Sunday we drove 45 min to see a basketball game and listened to Boxcar's "The Basketball Mystery").
My 2 and 5 year old adore the Circle Round podcast. Stories are adapted from myths and legends from around the world and are always clever. I enjoy them too! From 15-25 min, they are perfect for car rides.
We are really into the Valentine's books right now--The Day it Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond and Love, Z by Jessie Zima have been popular. My oldest kid has been devouring Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series. And one of my kiddos is really into Dogman at the moment (which is great, he has been a reluctant reader and now he is reading everyday).
Many of your recommendations have been big hits here lately with our 2 year old and 4 year old!
Popular breakfast table reads:
-Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara M Joose
-Ice! Poems about Polar Life by Douglas Florian
-Go, Dog, Go!
-A Child’s Book of Poems by Gyo Fujikawa
Bedtime/bathtime books
-King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub (4 year old LOVES this one!)
-Bathwater’s Hot
-The Tale of Custard the Dragon
-Trolls 5-Minute Stories (the Christmas gift from grandparents that we unfortunately cannot shake a nightly reading from yet!)
-Maisy Goes to the Dentist by Lucy Cousins
-Once Upon a Potty by Alana Frankel
-Arthur’s Chicken Pox by Marc Brown
-The Detective Dog by Julia Donaldson
-A Big Bed for Little Snow by Grace Lin
That makes me very happy 💕
We have been on a looooong repetitive journey with the Dory Fantasmagory series. We've read through each of them dozens of times. Luckily they are good and amusing, but would love to find something that my 5 year old loves nearly as much.
Now that she is reading, she's been pulling Elephant & Piggie off the shelf with a lot of frequency because she can read it to us which is INCREDIBLE. There has also been a revival of the Frog & Toad books which are so lovely.
We are on our first round through Dory Fantasmagory and we’re loving it!! Got the rec through this newsletter, so appreciated.
My 5 yo is also a huge fan of Dory (so am I!!), Elephant & Piggie, Ramona Quimby (possibly because her name is Ramona but who can say!), Charlotte's Web, she looooved Charlie & the Chocolate Factory/Matilda, and can't get enough of Henry & Mudge. We're currently reading this, too--it's BEAUTIFUL: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250799111/thewondrouswonders/
I have a post about Dory read-alikes! See my answer to the second question here: https://canweread.substack.com/p/first-chapter-books?utm_source=publication-search
My seven-year-old is also obsessed with the dog man! I have to pull the book out of his hands at bedtime. They are not my favorite books, but I love that they have made him fall in love with reading. We saw the movie on Sunday and I thought it was really good actually. Besides that I’m reading a SpongeBob mystery out loud to him, and my four-year-old is obsessed with a Bluey book and dragons love tacos.
We quote Dragons Love Tacos so often. If you love it, my family loves Those Darn Squirrels even more than DLT!
I thought the Dogman movie was surprisingly good! Since my 8 yo has been reading them alone more the last 2 years I had forgotten some of the more poignant moments. I especially loved the scene with lil Petey and Petey looking at the stars. And I take them out of his hands at bedtime too.
My daughter (7) and I are reading Millicent Quibb by Kate McKinnon and absolutely loving it. I've listened to some of the audiobook, too, and it is outstanding!
Both kids (7 and 4) have started listening to Captain Underpants Wonderbooks on the weekends when they have sleepovers in each other's rooms and they're loving that ☺️
Our read aloud right now with my 7 year old is “Word of Mouse” by James Patterson. She is reading anything about Alexander Hamilton on her own. 😅
I loved DogTown so much and also my author goal in life is to write the next Dogman. I should be so lucky.
Ok, so I'm curious. Is DogTown going to ruin me like so many other Applegate books!?
Maybe a little bit...but the end will love and heal you better.
My 7yo is a HUGE Lewis Hamilton fan. A couple nights ago, we finished "Racing Legends: Lewis Hamilton" by Maurice Hamilton (no relation, other than both being in the Formula 1 sphere), and, even though I already knew it, Lewis Hamilton is just a stand-up guy, and I'm so thankful my son landed on a good role model. I always scoffed at that sports-stars-as-role-model thing, but now that I have a sports enthusiast for a son, I get it.
And last night, my 4yo daughter and I read "World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney", which I'm pretty sure I got from a recommendation here, and we COULD NOT STOP giggling at the afterword from one of her sons because he mentioned an old saying of Cooney's: "Kids are like pancakes. The first few don't always turn out so well." We giggled, then we belly-laughed, calmed down, looked at each, and started all over again. Several times. It was joyous! So, thank you.
I don’t know that one and didn’t recommend it but I’ll check it out!
Love when you do these posts! My 10 year old and I just finished Wicked Marigold— I think your girls would LOVE.
Oooooh, thanks Katie.
My almost 2 year old is asking for Mel Fell by Cory Tabor multiple times per day. We've also both been enjoying the original Little Bear series. It's simple enough that he understands most if not all the words and I grew up on the tv show so it feels like a warm hug to me.
Love Little Bear, the books and the show.
LOVE Cynthia Rylant!!
On another note, good to see your response to "chat." I just did a poll about it on my newsletter, as Substack sent me an email about my "declining numbers" (!) and suggested I add it. Ugh. I've been heartened to see my readers agree with my thoughts on this.
I do love the comments and the interaction there/here :) So here we are.
Happy reading! I miss my days of reading with my boys. Enjoy every minute of it! My youngest moved out January 1. But came around to borrow books last week :)
Wow, I needed this quote right now: "(As Laura Lippman wrote in her most recent newsletter: “I hope for the best, and when I’m wrong, I’m disappointed, but I never regret having been hopeful. The way I see it, being hopeful reduces the number of hours one spends being miserable.” 100%. Here we are, despite it all — what a gift, and let us not forget that.)"
I have teenagers, but I still read some of the picture books we used to read together on my own (ha.) Especially in winter, I love to pull out some of our favorites. I'd have to say my very favorite was The Tomten and The Fox, a close second would be Seven Silly Eaters (we made the cake too.) Other quirky tales my kids got a kick out of were the Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr series and the Flicka, Ricka, Dicka books (these are by Swedish writer Maj Lindman) -- these could get a little weird, scary but my littles loved them and learned so much from these simple stories.
My daughter and I just started a nostalgic journey with my Series Of Unfortunate Events series. She’s loving it, and so am I. It’s amazing to watch her read big words that I would assume she’d need help with. So excited to read them all with her 🫶🏻
We're doing the Lemony Snicket audiobooks now (my 8yo 3rd grader is SUPER INTO IT and my 4yo pre-K-er likes it whenever Sunny makes noises) and I'm actually loving them too. I missed it as a kid (probably would have been too dark for me?) but it's perfect for my kid. Just about to finish The Austere Academy (#5) and wondering when it'll be safe to try the Netflix series or the movie? Looks like there are some pretty big spoilers for later things (I also do not want to be spoiled). Any advice? (Other than keep reading! Best way to avoid spoilers!)
We tried the movie but she just doesn’t care enough to sit still long enough to watch it. My girl is 7/in second grade. She loves the books though! We’re on the second one now. I loved this series as a kid. It is still probably as dark as I will go in my reading 😂😂 please give me all the sunshine 😂
Hahaha, same. My 8yo is loving the indignity of kids knowing better than adults and adults being incompetent/not listening when the kids are RIGHT. Also the punishments they have to go through are comically horrible - but it's been good in moments of tension when I ask him to <gasp> put away his laundry or help pack his lunch ...we can laugh about how Violet/Klaus would feel if they got to do those things. He's also taken to calling it a "Lemony Snickett Day" if he felt like nobody listened to him at school and he's grumpy about it. Yay fiction!!!