Choosing Ten Children's Books

What ten books do I think should be included in every children's library?

This post is a response to a writing prompt from Share-A-Story Shape A Future 2013.
Here's the writing prompt: If you were creating a children's library from scratch, what ten books would you start with, and why?
I found it difficult to choose only ten books. Here are the children's books I finally choose to include in this post and why.


10 Really Good Books for Children:

Good Night Moon

This is a wonderful book filled with rhymes, repeated language, and illustrations babies and toddlers love! It's a perfect book for bedtime reading. Little ones can find the mouse and point to objects in the pictures. Many toddlers and young children like to pretend read this story or fill in words while it's read to them.

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?


This book helped my oldest son learn to read. He was learning his letter sounds and words like moo, too, and boom showed him that letters can work together to make one sound. Plus this book is so fun with the rhyming and crazy pictures. It's a book kids want to have read to them over and over!

Five Little Monkeys Sitting in a Tree


Five Little Monkeys Sitting in a Tree was a favorite read aloud in my house. This book has kids counting, laughing, and looking! It can help little ones learn to count to five too. The illustrations are so cute. If you look close enough, you can see the monkeys hiding in the tree in case you though they got eaten by Mr. Crocodile. My kids loved the big red word SNAP that appears in the book when the crocodile tries to eat the monkey who teases it.

Counting Crocodiles
Here's a video of the illustrator showing how he
made the first drawings for the book.

Counting Crocodiles was another favorite read aloud in my house. The rhymes, repeated language, silliness, and amazing detailed pictures made this book fun to read well over a hundred times.

What a Bad Dream

I love this book and children do too! Little Critter dreams he drinks a magic potion and gets to do crazy things without an adult telling him what to do. Then he gets lonely and wants a bedtime story. His parents wake him up just in time. This is another of my family's favorite read alouds. Can you tell I think reading aloud is super important?

Hop on Pop

Kids love to hear this story read aloud over and over too. The really cool part about this book is that spelling patterns and sounding out rules can be taught with this book.

Are You My Mother?

This is another book that children ask to be read to them again and again. It has adventure as the bird who falls out of his nest searches for his mother. It has kindness as he is placed back in his nest. It has a beautiful ending with love between the mother bird and her baby. It's a great story to read right before tucking in your little ones.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

I chose this book, because it's fun illustrations and great words for early readers. This is a good book for early readers there are pictures to support a reader and words that early readers can sound out as they learn letter sounds and letter combination sounds.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a good read aloud with some humor. It is also a good chapter book for children who are showing some confidence in reading independently to enjoy on their own or to read aloud.

Red Midnight

Red Midnight is an action packed book. That will hook a reader from beginning to end. This book would be appropriate for children age nine and up. There is some violence, so a parent may want to preview the book first. I've read this book twice. All three of my children read it and loved it. My youngest son still says it's his favorite book ever.

There's my list. I hope you found a few books you like.
Happy Reading!
Michelle Breum
Owner of Parent and Child Reading Assistance