Sometimes, finding a great children’s book is easy. You remember reading Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey as a child, and then you go to the library and ask the librarian where it might be. She leads to you to the right shelf, and along the way you see a display of new books and you snag a copy of The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen. You casually ask the librarian for a recommendation, and she hands you some of her favorites like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig, The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers, and Seven Silly Eaters by Mary Ann Hoberman and Marla Frazee. You leave the library with five amazing books and the feeling that the world is full of awesome books, and everywhere you turn in the library some magical reading experience awaits.
But then sometimes you leave the library with books that are, quite frankly, a disappointment. Sometimes, finding a great book seems really hard. It’s not the right book for where your child is. It’s too easy and doesn’t engage him or way too hard and goes right over her head. Sometimes, all your child wants to do is pick out level-one readers with his favorite characters from a movie or show, and the books are super boring for you to read. Sometimes, a book has an agenda that you don’t appreciate, or maybe you are sympathetic to agenda, but honestly book has low artistic and literary merit. Or maybe your child picks the first thing she sees on the shelf, or pick the exact same books every week, or is at the charming stage where all she wants is to take all the books off the shelf!
Finding the right book at the right time can be challenging. I love our local library and our children’s librarians are awesome, and sometimes they are the only way to find the perfect book. But most of the time, the main way I find books for my kids is not just wandering into the library and browsing.
Instead, I use book lists, request books online, and pick them up at the library.
And where, you ask, do I get these book lists?
I’m so glad you asked! Here are 20 different book-list sources that I use to find lists of great books for my kids. (And then I write down the very best of the best, the ones my kids absolutely love, and I put them on my own lists! Books for 1 Year Olds, 2 Year Olds, 3 Year Olds, 4 Year Olds.)
20 Guide Books, Books Lists, and Web Resources for Finding Great Kids Books
print resources — What is better than a book full of books?
- Honey for a Child’s Heart Updated and Expanded: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life by Gladys Hunt. This is the classic text for quality children’s books, recently updated with an eye towards including more diverse books. If you only purchase one book, this is the one that will get you from your first board books to gifts for your teen. I’m taking a wild guess, but there might be nearly a thousand book recommendations here.
- The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids by Sarah Mackenzie. While this book only has a fraction of the awesome book lists on her website and podcast show notes (available for free on her website The Read Aloud Revival), these several hundred book recommendations are all top notch recommendations for a wide span of ages and stages. A big portion of this book is about how, even after your child is reading on his or her own, reading aloud as a family is really important and wonderful.
- Before Five in a Row by Jane C. Lambert and More Before Five in a Row by Carrie Lambert Bozeman. These are a wealth of wonderful books that can be read again and again (they suggest 5 days in a row!–hence the title) with activities that go along with each book. I have never done the activities, but I used the books listed there (they are also available online) for a lot of our preschool books.
- Lessons for a Lifetime by Maureen Kasdorf. Written by a church friend and fellow Wheaton Alumna, this book has 20 chapters, each centering on a beautiful children’s book (classic books like Blueberries for Sal, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Corduroy, and Goodnight Moon, as well as new favorites like Last Stop on Market Street, Ron’s Big Mission, and Extra Yarn) and with 2 to 5 additional book recommendations at the end of each chapter.
- Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children edited by Leslie Bustard. 40 essays from a wide variety of perspectives and age focuses, this book is a smorgasbord of good book lists, recommendations, and meditations. With several very helpful appendices in the back that combine the individual lists in a variety of ways, it’s one of the last projects that the wonderful Leslie Bustard completed before her death, a big gift to the rest of us.
- The World Treasury of Children’s Literature Book One & Two by Clifton Fadiman or the British The Treasury of Children’s Literature: Stories, Poems, and Nursery Rhymes. Big treasuries of children’s literature are great to take on a trip when you have limited space. The downside of these can be the formatting, skipping illustrations or fitting two illustrations onto one page. But you can use them as a guided tour of great children’s works or authors that you can later get the original, fully illustrated versions at the library.
- Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg (from Gesell Institute of Human Development). All the books in this series from the 1980s have great classic developmental milestones parents can be aware of and suggestions for navigating each season. Also, in the back there is an appendix with books for that particular age.
- Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls by Mitali Perkins. While this book only mentions seven books, they are all amazing, plus it’s a great introduction to Mitali Perkins herself, who has written great contemporary works. Plus is a beautiful way to think about stories and virtue.
- Give Your Child the World by Jamie C. Martin. Organized geographically, Jamie C. Martin has great lists of over 600 books for kids 4-6, // 6-8 // 8-10 // 10-12 to help kids learn about different parts of the world and different cultures. A homeschool mom with several adopted kids from around the world, she has a heart to equip kids to love God, reading, and the world.
- The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education by Susan Wise Bauer & Jessie Wise. This the book on classical education, with big reading lists that go along with grades first through twelfth. Some of the suggestions are pretty geared towards the classical student (like reading sections of Aristotle and Plato to your first grader) but other suggestions are easily adaptable to students of many different educational models.
- **Bonus: The Read-Aloud Handbook: Seventh Edition by Jim Trelease. This is a classic book (with many editions!) I tried using it when the kids were toddlers, but I found that the recommendations from read aloud treasury at the end didn’t have many books that we connected much with. But recently I read that someone specifically recommended the 7th edition from 2013 (the last one that Jim Trelease personally edited). So we got that one from the library and with my kids at ages 5 and 8, this time we’ve really enjoyed many of the books! (And I did recognize books on the list that we love earlier, but they aren’t arranged by age recommendations, even though they are given). So I think it might be most helpful with school age kids, or at least do pay attention to the age recommendations because they seem pretty accurate.
web resources—the internet at it’s best! People sharing book recommendations you can pick up at your local library all for free.
- The Read Aloud Revival. I love and admire Sarah Mackenzie’s work so much, and her list of seasonal picture books is top notch…and so are her chapter book recommendations…and so her books for moms as well. I know that basically anything she recommends is going to be a 4 or 5 star reading experience for me and my kids.
- A complete list of books of Reading Rainbow Books. This basically speaks for itself; the show Reading Rainbow consistently picked awesome books. And bonus, many of these are available at most libraries because being on the show tended to boost those books’ sales!
- The Dolly Parton Imagination Library list. If you are frequenter of free little libraries like I am, you have likely seen paperback kids books from the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Each year the books that the organization sends out (for free!) to kids changes slightly, but there are some real gems in there.
- Charlotte Mason Homeschool Resources: The Unlikely Homeschool // Charlotte Mason Home // Simply Charlotte Mason Charlotte Mason homeschoolers arguably have some of the best book lists around, because they love living books (and hate twaddle!). These three websites from Charlotte Mason homeschool mother-teachers have really great lists of read-aloud chapter books, books by grade level, and good and beautiful picture books. There are also larger Charlotte Mason esq book lists like The Good and The Beautiful, Re-shelving Alexandria, John Senior’s 1000 Good Book List, and AmblesideOnline.org. And a classic print book is Books Children Love: A Guide to the Best Children’s Literature by Elizabeth Laraway Wilson.
- 189 Great Books for Catholic Kids from Word on Fire (complied by Haley Stewart). I have followed Haley Stewart online for years, and I love her book recommendations (and now she edits and writes her own children books!).
- 1000 Books before Kindergarten List. A big list of 150+ “must read” books for preschoolers connected to the 1000 Books before Kindergarten reading initiative.
- Lindsey Kubly’s Picture Book List I think Lindsey Kubly has excellent taste, and I love when she shares good books (she has kids a bit older than mine, and I like getting a sneak peak into the next stage). This list has 66 beautiful books on it.
- What Do We Do All Day Erica has so many book lists– over 300 of them! She is a wealth of information. I will say that there are more progressive books in her lists, especially her middle grade lists, but I still find a lot of great books in there. Usually, her description of the book will give me a heads up if I think it’s appropriate for my kids, but I usually will preview these before reading them the first time to my kids. (Similar in tone and scope are Everyday Reading.com, Read Brightly.com, Imagination Soup.net, The Waldock Way.com — I tend to like their non-fiction lists more.)
- Amazon Teachers Picks Again, not all of these are going to be appropriate for my kids, but there are a lot of gems on this list. I also find that Amazon has decent suggestions in general for what other people read or looked at after a book that I liked.
- 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time Lists: BBC, The Times, Scholastic, Penguin Random House, NPR, New York Public Library, Focus on the Family, The New York Review Children’s Collection again not every book is going to work for every family, but I have found some great books on these 100 best lists! And of course, the Caldecott Medal and its British counterpart the Kate Greenway/Carnegie Medal are always good places to find beautifully illustrated books.
- **Bonus: My Lists! AmyRogersHays.com’s Children’s Picture Books List. Based on the individual posts for each age, I have a running list of 200+ picture books organized by when my own children loved a particular book. And of course, my list of favorite Newbery‘s after reading all of the medal winners!
Where do you find great (lists of) kids books?
Amy, this is Christina E. Petrides (we were at Georgetown together). Thank you so much for this guide to guides—knowing what a thoughtful mom looks to to locate children’s books is a great benefit to me as a writer, since that’s my primary audience. Now, I am off to research how I can get my books reviewed in some of the resources you mentioned! Incidentally, would you consider reviewing my three books yourself? If such a thing interests you, please email me your regular mailing address. Thank you!