Here are the books and websites I return to when I am looking for new titles to read with my children:
Books
- Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt
- Read for the Heart: Whole Books for WholeHearted Families by Sarah Clarkson
- Booklists compiled by the editorial staff of Bethlehem Books, found in the back of A Landscape with Dragons by Michael O’Brien
- Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
- Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
- Before Austen Comes Aesop: The Children’s Great Books and How to Experience Them by Cheri Blomquist
- Books Children Love: A Guide to the Best Children’s Literature by Elizabeth Wilson
- Books That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values Through Stories by William Kilpatrick and Gregory and Suzanne M. Wolfe
Websites
- AmblesideOnline Curriculum
- LearningThroughLiterature.com
- ReadAloudDad.com: Especially for recommendations of illustrated classics.
- ReadAloudRevival.com
- WellReadKid.com
Links
- John Senior’s Incomplete Life-Long Reading List posted underneath article at Crisis Magazine
- Yellow House Story Shoppe: I first discovered Chelsea on Instagram. She recently opened an online bookshop which offers “timeless tales, vintage treasures, and living children’s literature”. Her selections are excellent.
- The Ultimate Guide to Shakespeare from Your Morning Basket
- “Classic Children’s Literature” from Hillsdale College Online Courses
- Memoria Press, a family-run publishing company that specializes in classical Christian curriculum, has wonderful literature selections. Check out their read-alouds here.
- Gutenberg.org is a free resource with books in the public domain, such as The Princess and the Goblin (MacDonald), The Blue Fairy Book (Lang), A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson), The Aesop for Children (Winter)
Other
- Exceptional children’s book illustrators: Cicely Mary Barker, Elsa Beskow, Jan Brett, Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Barbara Cooney, Kinuko Y. Craft, Ingri & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, Tomie dePaola, Paul Galdone, Gyo Fujikawa, Felix Hoffmann, Trina Schart Hyman, Bagram Ibatoulline, Susan Jeffers, P.J. Lynch, Robert McCloskey, Jerry Pinkney, Beatrix Potter, Alice and Martin Provensen, Richard Scarry, E.H. Shepard, Jessie Willcox Smith, Gennady Spirin, Tasha Tudor, Eloise Wilkin, Leonard Weisgard, N.C. Wyeth, Lisbeth Zwerger
Articles
Will Rascals Defend Our Civilization… and What Books will they Read? by William Edmund Fahey from Crisis Magazine
“…the great books demand a supporting culture—both before and after and throughout.”
William Edmund Fahey
Awakening the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian from The Imaginative Conservative
“The great fairy tales and children’s fantasy stories attractively depict character and virtue. In these stories, the virtues glimmer as if in a looking glass, and wickedness and deception are unmasked of their pretensions to goodness and truth. These stories make us face the unvarnished truth about ourselves while compelling us to consider what kind of people we want to be.”
Vigen Guroian
From the Archive: That Shriveled Grind by Andrew Kern from Circe Institute
“The change is this: 50 years ago, parents read things to children that children could not read themselves, that were not directed primarily at the senses, and that contained deep formal and material lessons for the children.”
Andrew Kern
Beloved Bookshelf 