Here are the books and websites that I return to time and again 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
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 at Crisis Magazine
- The Yellow House Story Shoppe on Instagram: Chelsea has the very best children’s book recommendations.
- The Ultimate Guide to Shakespeare from Your Morning Basket
- “Classic Children’s Literature” from Hillsdale College Online Courses
- “Building a Home Library: Children’s Books” from the podcast “Homeschool Made Simple with Carol Joy Seid”
- Memoria Press, a family-run publishing company that specializes in classical Christian curriculum, has wonderful literature selections. Check out their read-aloud packages or buy books individually.
- 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
Here are a few resources I have not yet read, but look excellent:
- 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
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 