7 Books You Want Your Kids to Read

Let’s face it, the bookstore and library are saturated with children’s books. How do you know what to choose?

For me, if a book has dense paragraphs of prose per picture, I almost always put it back down, no matter how skilled/beautiful/cute the illustrations. My six-year-olds respond better to a decent balance between prose and pictures. They’re more engaged, and these are usually more concisely told stories that utilize language more effectively and, so, are more fun to read.

From my extensive hunt for optimal reading material for my feral kids, I’ve compiled a list of 7 tried-and-true children’s books you will love reading with your child.

Books about feelings

Bear with me here. I am still learning to express my own feelings, let alone teach my kids how to do so. But these reads assist them in understanding the range of and often conflicting emotions they can experience.

Both In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek & Christine Roussey and I’m Happy-Sad Today by Lory Britain & Matthew Rivera feature beautiful, bright colors and accessible discussions about feelings.

Bonus features: I’m Happy-Sad Today has helpful instructions at the end of the book for experiencing this book with your children and fun cut-outs for sensory-sensitive kids in In My Heart.

Books about socializing

Be Kind by Pat Zietlow Miller & Jen Hill combines soft, skillful watercolors and sweet, rhythmic prose in an important story that demonstrates that how you behave toward others, even the smallest gestures, makes a big impact.

Sad books

Sometimes you just need to get up in your feels with a book. Oh wait, that’s me. Sometimes kids need a bittersweet read to prepare them for the bittersweet moments of life. I mean, that is the only way I can justify why our parents allowed The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein to be a seminal book of our childhoods. I’m only half-joking. It’s a classic, it’s beautiful, and it hits like 70% cacao.

Books that encourage

Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Suess delivers powerful life lessons with all of the fun wordplay and quirky story-telling Suess is known for. It handles ambition, achievement, and the inevitable failures of life.

Books with counting

Stack the Cats by Susan Ghahremani–I mean, you saw the picture, right? And the rest of it is just as freaking adorable.

Wordless books

Some of our favorites have been Journey by Aaron Becker, The Conductor by Laëtitia Devernay, and Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell.

Interestingly enough, I almost added Instructions by Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess even though it has words. I didn’t remember that, because I was looking for books that make you think outside of the box to find the line of the story. And Instructions kind of does that by dropping the reader into a setting/story without context.

I love the questions my kids ask when reading these illustration-only stories. It’s important for them to stretch their story-telling muscles and co-write the story with their interpretation.

A plain good story…

This is my favorite children’s book ever. It is like a warm hug. The colors and illustration are gorgeous, and the story is sweet with the good lived-in feel of a folk tale, like an old favorite sweater. A Mouse Called Julian by this same author is also a great read.

We are always on the hunt for new favorites. What are some of your favorite children’s books?

6 Tell-Tale Signs You’re a Writer*

1. Simplicity Be Damned!

You obsess, perhaps a bit like the way I did over what my first blog entry would be about–to which my hyper-logical, complimentary other half soothed with, “just introduce yourself”. So simple yet too simple for me (just who do I think I am?)

2. System Overloading

The first leads right into the next sign: you over analyze.  Everything. (Which you may have been able to deduce I have a problem with given all the parenthetical asides already and the possible lack of a steadily progressing, streamlined idea). I’ve often wondered, did this come before the writing or did the writing stem from it as a necessary outlet? I think they developed about the same time in my preteens. You may argue that obsession and over analysis are one in the same. I beg to differ. Being an over-analytic gets Sherlock Holmes into a lot of trouble –because he can’t turn a blind eye–but he solves the issues! Obsession…well, obsession makes you all that much closer to the villain archetype (I just admitted to being a villain archetype, didn’t I?). And not to mention, obsession brings you that much closer to misery. 

Ha.

3. Cats.

Speaking of misery. Just a jest. I love my prowling, reflective-eyed keepers of the Underworld. I even wrote a poem about them called “The Order of Felis Domestica”, which you can find in this lovely lit mag here.

Nala…no, she’s not dead. She’s recharging her demonic energy

Captcha disarms unsuspecting victims with her adorable allure

How’d that get in there?

You had to know I was gonna talk about this. Even those who don’t have cats can empathize (dog lovers, bird lovers, turtle lovers, ferret lovers, what have you). I recently happened to notice that there’s an abundance of cat lovers in the writing field. Or maybe not all of you are “cat lovers” per se, but slaves to cats rather. You live for their benefit: keeping the bottom of their food dish from becoming visible, having phalanges with which they can torment like baby mice, maintaining a nice, cushiony body that they can knead in their one particular moment of affection (also known to a feline as weakness).

4. Your Internal Compass is Always Pointed Due Institutions that Exist Solely to House Books

You know where the library is, and you know how to use it. In fact, you get excited about trips to the library even though you already have hundreds of books in your living space, threatening to bury you at any given moment and steal your last breath, which you would willingly forfeit just to go on living with the damn things. Because living without them is not an option.

5. You Daydream

A lot. Daydreaming may also be known as an activity my best friend/writing partner extraordinaire likes to call “what-if-ing.” What-if-ing can consume you. I personally wish I had more of a knack for it, to just sit down and let everything else go–the cleaning, the cats, the obsession and over analysis about other aspects of my life. But when it does take hold of me, watch out. Stark. Raving. Mad.

You appreciate these paroxysms as a writer; there is some value in being, in a sense, mad. But, please, do not think I am making light of psychological imbalances–it is in fact one of my biggest fears (which I intend to write about in a later post). I am only tipping my hat to the suffering and psychological torture that incessantly plops down on the billows of the writer’s productivity.

6. A Multilayered View of the World

Finally, as a writer, you may find that you associate events of your life, or favorite songs and books, with milestones (or fictional events) in your writing: when you finished writing that poem on the metaphysical nature of the coffee mug, you were listening to  “Satan Gave Me a Taco” by Beck; when you finished your novel, your nephew was born not a month later (a month may seem, to the non-writer, like too big of a time gap for these two events to be relevant, but that’s why this post is entitled “6 Tell-Tale Signs You’re a Writer” and not “6 Weird, Random Things That Don’t Really Ring True for Non-Writers”). You get the picture.

*bonus sign, you know the author that used ‘tell-tale’ in one of his story titles

***

So while outlining some of the tell-tale signs of being a writer, I suppose I did just what my complimentary part said I should do: introduce myself (and maybe I fulfilled this task a bit over-zealously). What are some signs you deem indicative of being a writer that bleed into you day to day life in a helpful (or not so helpful) way? When did you first KNOW?