Playful Rooted

Hi friends! Happy holiday season! Hope everyone in the US had a great Thanksgiving. We stayed home, watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, took naps, and ate homemade Thai food and pumpkin pie. Haha! It was a really nice, low-key holiday, and sometimes that’s the best kind. And we all definitely enjoyed having Ben off work for a couple days.

Today I’m sharing something near and dear to my heart: books! It has always brought me such joy to share books with my children; it’s something I looked forward to long before I became a mom, and watching them learn to love stories and words has been a real highlight of my life. I’m so excited to see what books they find themselves drawn to as they get older; I think you can get to know people in a really unique way by learning what they like to read. One of my favorite quotes since college is this line by François Mauriac:

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”

So true, right? A beloved book can be as comforting as a cozy pair of sweatpants or a chat with your best friend.

Anyway! Kids’ books. Specifically, kids’ chapter books. We started digging into longer stories with Luca around 18 months ago. I actually didn’t expect him to have the attention span for chapter books at that age (he was still just 3), but he BLEW me away. He understood plot points and character development and could summarize what we had read in more detail than I could recall; it was wild. The kid has incredible attention to detail and a great memory for stories. I know not every child will sit and listen to a long book at such a young age, but I do think kids in general are capable of SO much more than we give them credit for! Even Sawyer at age 2 will play quietly, putting together a puzzle or building a train track, while I read out loud to Luca, and I’m positive he’s absorbing some elements of each book we read.

There are so many great kids’ series out there these days! It’s a good time to be a bibliophile, especially with ready access to reviews and information online. My favorite resource for researching books is Happily Ever Elephants; I’ll often read descriptions here and then when something catches my eye, I’ll check Amazon for more in-depth reviews (and then I hit the library or purchase from Thrift Books). Needless to say, I’m picky about books, especially ones I’m going to read to my children!

While there are dozens of excellent series to choose from, the following five are ones that we have particularly loved reading over the past year.

The Magic Treehouse

My friend Taylor introduced me to this series after she had scored a ton of the books secondhand. She said that she had read them all as a kid, and after borrowing a bunch from her and reading them with Luca, I’m shocked that I had never heard of it!

Jack and Annie are a brother-and-sister duo who travel the world in a magical treehouse and go on adventures involving many different time periods, locations, and historical events. This series is amazing for broadly introducing kids to the concepts of history, geography, and multiculturalism. Each book has 10 chapters, and it only takes about 45 minutes to read a whole book. Luca loves them because they’re exciting, adventurous, and sometimes a little mysterious. And there are SO many of them (I think over 100 including the Merlin Missions!); we’re still working our way through the whole set.

Nate the Great

These are the books I remember reading as a kid!

Nate is a young detective who solves cases for all his friends in the neighborhood along with his dog, Sludge. Luca likes this series because you can collect clues throughout each book and make predictions about the solution. It’s silly and fun, and each book is super short, taking only about 20 minutes to finish. This series also has a pretty eccentric cast of characters which is always fun to read.

Dragon Masters

Dragon Masters is a fantasy series that follows a group of special kids, each of whom has the ability to connect with and train a specific dragon. Each book features a different adventure; they have to track down special artifacts or defeat evil wizards or save the day one way or another, which Luca loves. This series also introduced him to the idea of a cliffhanger, which he hates! Haha! Join the club, bud. Personally, this isn’t my favorite series overall, but I do appreciate that each book enforces themes of friendship, teamwork, determination, and bravery.

The Mouse and The Motorcycle

Such a classic! This trilogy follows Ralph, a mouse who lives in a hotel with his family and discovers he has the ability to talk to some of the children who stay there. He receives a miniature motorcycle from one of those children and goes on lots of exciting adventures with it: around the hotel, to summer camp, and to school. These books are a little bit longer; definitely not finish-in-one-sitting material, but I like that we can practice some patience that way.

The language in this book is outdated, but there is a certain charm about that, and it’s great for building kids’ vocabularies with words they don’t hear often. It also prompted a discussion with my 5-year-old about how language evolves over time; no big deal, just teaching a linguistics class over here. ::pats self on back::

[NOTE: I find that in Beverly Cleary books in general, I do have to change the wording a little bit or even omit a paragraph here or there to avoid things I don’t love (like kids teasing each other in a mean-spirited way or adults saying that little girls shouldn’t play in the dirt). These things definitely aren’t a big part of her books, but they do crop up from time to time, so this isn’t a series you can necessarily read absent-mindedly.]

Zoey and Sassafras

I LOVE these books! This is such an excellent series for introducing young kids to the scientific method and demonstrating the importance of observation and critical thinking.

It’s a little bit fantastical in that there are magical creatures featured throughout the series; Luca really enjoys this. I love that it presents science and logic to kids in a way that’s super fun. I also appreciate that the parents in this book consistently empower their daughter to think critically, practice resilience, and do the hard things that they know she’s capable of.

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So those are Luca’s and my top chapter book picks of this year! I always love to hear recommendations for books for young kids, so send ’em my way if you’ve got them!

xo!