Parent-child reading times – even into the teen years – are one of the best ways to turn your child into a well-rounded and educated reader, at least according to early twentieth century author Walter Taylor Field. To encourage parents to read with their children, Field includes a number of age-appropriate suggestions in his book Fingerposts to Children’s Reading. We’ve listed a handful of his suggestions below:
Ages 1-2
Mother Goose
Ages 3-4
Aesop’s Fables, Aesop
Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson
Ages 5-6
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Ages 7-8
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “These two books – often published in one volume – supply the best general idea of the Greek myths for children of this age.”
Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ages 9-10
Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare: “Children should be encouraged to go as far in Shakespeare as their interest will lead them.”
The Story of the Iliad, by Alfred J. Church
The Odyssey, by Homer
Ages 11-12
Child’s History of England, Charles Dickens
The Boy’s King Arthur, Sidney Lanier
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle
Ages 13-14
Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Snowbound, John Greenleaf Whittier
The Man Without a Country, Edward Everett Hale
Ages 14-15
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Silas Marner, George Eliot
Image Credit: Tiny Tony Books and Toys
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