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