Our Favorite Read Alouds

One of my favorite things to do with my kids is to read to them and one of my favorite parts of our homeschooling day is our read aloud time.  We also frequently do family read aloud times in the evenings and it’s so fun to share a story together as a whole family.  Reading to my kids is so important to me!   Here is a list of some of our favorite read alouds as well as a list of ALL the read alouds we’ve done through the years (with some thoughts and notes).  I hope it helps you as you’re picking read alouds to do with your family!

If you are new to doing read alouds, haven’t ever done a read aloud, or already do read alouds, I recommend EVERYONE read the book The Read-Aloud Family!  It’s one of my favorite books and I recommend it to all parents (whether you homeschool or not).  It talks about the importance of read alouds and gives tips on how to implement them in your home.

Our Favorite Read Alouds

Favorite early chapter books

These are some of my favorite books to read to the 3/4/5 age group who are just getting started listening chapter books.

• Magic Treehouse (Honestly the vocabulary is meh and repetitive and I don’t love them as read alouds, but they were our first chapter book read alouds when my oldest was 4/5 so they hold a special place in my heart and they did a lot to foster his love of history)
• Sophie Mouse (These are the sweetest chapter books!  I found these when my daughter, my #3 kiddo, was 5 and we fell in love with them.  Beautiful stories, sweet morals, not scary at all.  Just wonderful.)
• Mercy Watson (Funny and super short, engaging for even my 3yo.)
• Charlotte’s Web (Such a classic.  Read it as an early chapter book when my boys were around 6 and 4, then later when my daughter was 5 she got it for her Yoto player and listened to it over and over and over again.)
• Paddington (Fun and sweet and funny!)

Favorite longer chapter books

As my older two got a little older and we progressed to longer books, these have been some of our favorites:

(see my notes in my yearly reading logs below for my more detailed thoughts about each of these books/series)

• Harry Potter
• Little House on the Prairie series
• Vanderbeekers
• Ramona
• Green Ember
• Mysterious Benedict Society
• Rush Revere

Our Read Aloud Log

Over the years we have read a LOT of books together.  In 2021 I started keeping a log of our read aloud from each year.  Here’s a list of them along with some of my thoughts.

(And for the record, because I know people have weirdly passionate and conflicting views about this, I count listening to audiobooks as reading.  If my kids listen to a book on their Yoto I don’t count it in our family read aloud log, but if we all listen together as a group then I 100% count it.  Also, think audiobooks shouldn’t count?  Maybe this will change your mind.)

2019 – June 2021

I didn’t keep a running record of our read alouds until June 2021 so this is not a comprehensive list, but here are some of the ones we read before 2021 that we loved (or didn’t love but are worth noting).  These were all read when my oldest was between the ages of 5 and 7.

• Charlotte’s Web – A classic and one that we’ve fallen back in love with, my now 5 year old daughter listens to it on her Yoto player all the time
• Charlie and Chocolate Factory – Honestly this story is a little weird but it was one of our first “real” chapter book read alouds
• Paddington – The Paddington series was so delightful and charming!  A definite hit.
• Mrs Piggle Wiggle – We started these but stopped when the kids started imitating some of the bad behavior…the whole premise of the book was that this behavior was bad and Mrs Piggle Wiggle creatively finds a way around it, but my kids didn’t seem to pick up on that and just began repeating the very annoying phrases the “bad” kids were saying.  We put that one away for the time being!
• Magic Treehouse – This is where it all began.  Our very first chapter book read aloud right after my oldest turned 5 was a Magic Treehouse book.  Since then we’ve read a large chunk of the series together.  Truthfully…these are annoying to read.  The history in them is intruiging to my history-loving kids, but the vocabulary is low-level and the sentences are choppy – good for a newly reading kid reading on their own, not that fun for a read aloud.  I was happy when we moved past these as read alouds and the kids could read them on their own.
• Little House in the Big Woods – This is one of my favorite books and I was so excited to introduce them to the kids!  They enjoyed it but my very sensitive kiddo got scared about the wild animals mentioned so just a warning there.

 

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July 2021 – June 2022

Kids’ ages: 7/8, 5/6, 2/3, and newborn

This was my first year to record our read alouds and I was shocked at the end of the year to realize we had read a whopping 56 books together!  Granted, many of them were very short chapter books that could be read in one sitting or just a few days but still…impressive!  And this was with a brand new baby (born June 2021) and moving into a new house!  It helped that I took advantage of lots of newborn snuggle time and used it as reading time (or listening time if we listened to audiobooks).

Something that was really fun and memorable this year is that we accidentally started doing family read alouds and loved it!  Up until this point I had always read with the kids during the day when Michael was working or I’d read a bit to them in the evening while he was working on supper or something so he’d hear bits and pieces but we’d never done intentional family read aloud time.  The same was true with Little House on the Prairie…I had been reading it to the kids but one day about halfway through the book I was reading when Michael got off work and so he listened to me finish that chapter and was hooked.  He enjoyed the story and wanted to hear the rest of it, so we started reading that only in the evenings and on weekends so he could listen.  That became our family read aloud.  We continued with On the Banks of Plum Creek (and then the following year the whole rest of the Little House series as well as Harry Potter).

It’s been so special to have read aroud time with the whole family!  Having a common story that we were all invested was wonderful and we had great discussions about what had just happened or what we thought might happen, what we’d do if we were in that situation, etc.  It brought some really thoughtful conversations to our meal time!

This year’s list:

• Little House on the Prairie and On The Banks of Plum Creek
• The Rush Revere series
• The Molly & Felicity books (from American Girl)
• The Penderwicks
• Mr Popper’s Penguins
• Treasure Hunters by James Patterson
• Pippi Longstocking
• Winnie the Pooh
• Magic Treehouse
• A-Z Mysteries

Some thoughts

• It’s really cool to watch our progress this year.  At the beginning of the year we were reading smaller chapter books like Magic Treehouse and A-Z Mysteries, but by the end of the year we were reading much longer chapter books!
• I really enjoyed the first Penderwicks book…it had an old fashioned feel while being set in current times but we stopped listening part way through book two as it gets much more into middle-school-interested-in-boys territory than I feel is appropriate for my kids’ ages (there was nothing inappropriate, at least as far as we read, just too old for them)
• Molly and Felicity were so nostalgic for me…I read those as a child and loved re-reading them as an adult.  I was a little afraid my boys might not like them since, after all, they are part of the American GIRL series, but they loved them!  They weren’t “girly” at all and since my boys LOVE history they really, really enjoyed these historical fiction stories.
• The Rush Revere series was a huge hit!  Honestly, I was super skeptical.  Michael had told me about these, he’d actually read the first one himself, but I wasn’t sure.  So often when a celebrity releases a book it’s not that well done but it’s popular becuase a celebrity wrote it, you know?  And that’s what I expected from these but I was pleasantly surprised!  Rush Limbaugh is actually quite good at writing kids’ books – these were very humorous and chock full of information about history (which my boys adore).

Not all of these books were hits though…I thought Mr. Popper’s Penguins was awful (How is this a Newberry award book!?).  Terrible ending.  And Treasure Hunters by James Patterson had a lot of language we don’t use in our house, derogatory descriptions of people, teenage references, etc.  The story was ok but it had a lot of things I wasn’t happy with.

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July 2022 – June 2023

Kids’ ages: 8/9, 6/7, 3/4, and 1

This year was another big read aloud year for us!  We read 40 books (either read aloud by me or listened together on audiobook), which wasn’t our highest number of books, but that included the whole Harry Potter series!  Whew!  This was such a magical year.  I’ve been dreaming about introducing Harry Potter to my kids for many years and this year was the one.  It was so very much fun to read through it with them.  The boys LOVED it!  Miss 3yo listened here and there but it was mostly over her head.  I was afraid it might be too scary for the boys but they did fine with it.

We did Harry Potter as a family read aloud so I read this one at night or in the car or on Saturdays or just whenever Michael was off work.  It was such a fantastic family experience – such a special thing to teach my kids about something that was a huge part of my childhood and teen years!

This year’s list:

• Harry Potter series
• Finished the Little House series  (Farmer Boy, The Long Winter, The Shores of Silver Lake, and These Happy Golden Years)
• The Ramona series
• Frindle
• The Chocolate Touch
• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
• Story of the World volumes 2 and 3 (we use these as a history curriculum)
• The Samantha series (American Girl books)
• some of the Kirsten books (American Girl books)
• Green Ember

Some thoughts:

• We listened to the Ramona series on audiobook…Stockard Channing is the narrator and she does a great job!  I highly recommend listening to them.  I checked them out through our library on the Libby app but since then have purchased them so the kids can listen on their Yoto players.
• The Green Ember started off slooooowwwwww for me.  I was pretty bored for over half of the book and didn’t get what all the hype was, but by the end I was hooked!  Rabbits fighting wolves with swords…it was a huge hit with my kids and I loved it too once I got in to it.  Also, the vocabulary is *chef’s kiss*…so good.  Really, really fabulous vocabulary!
• The Little House series is a must read for kids and adults.  They’ve been some of my favorite books my whole life.  These were also family read alouds and I tell you what, The Long Winter impacted Michael so much that he talks about it at least once a week!  I think he and I enjoyed reading these even more than the kids did.  It brought up so much good discussion for all of us about how our lives and so different from theirs!

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July 2023 – June 2024

Kids’ ages: 9/10, 7/8, 4/5, and 2

This year our number of books went waaaaayyyy down with only 15 books read aloud.  Part of that was because my 2yo made it really, REALLY hard to do read alouds.  Also, this year my 5yo and 8yo got Yoto players so they listened to a ton of audiobooks on their own.  I greatly missed reading to them but it was the season we were in.

This year’s list

• Finished the Green Ember series (Ember’s End) and listened to some of the spin off series books (Jo Shanks’ books and Old Natalia books)
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
• Holes
• Vanderbeekers series

Some thoughts:

• The Vanderbeeker series was so good!  It’s a seven book series that follows five siblings who live in Harlem, New York.  The kids get along (minor irritations like all siblings have, but overall they are loving and kind and enjoy being together) and the they have a strong family unit.  Note there are some hard topics covered (death of an elderly loved one, cancer, death of kids from cancer).
• Again, still a huge fan of Green Ember!  We have love love loved this series!

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July 2024 – June 2025

Kids’ ages: 10/11, 8/9, 5/6, and 3

This year started off really slow as we were still in the 3yo doesn’t want me to read and will scream loudly if I try phase but as the year progressed he chilled out a lot and by the end of the year we were back to reading together just about every day.  So our overall number was pretty low but I have hope for the future that we’re back on track!

Our book count for this year was 11 or 32, depending on how you want to count it.

We discovered the Sophie Mouse books this year and I read all 21 of them to my daughter but my older two didn’t listen to all of them.  They listened to some, but not every single one.  So I hesitate to count them in our “official” read aloud count, although I did read them aloud to at least some of the kids.

So, 11 books that were read to all of them, 32 that we read to some combination of them.

This year’s list

• Mysterious Benedict Society series
• Sophie Mouse
• Mr Lemoncello’s Library series
• Percy Jackson

Some thoughts:

• The Mysterious Benedict Society is a new favorite!  These books were so fun and funny and, well, mysterious!  Really engaging stories that I enjoyed as much as the kids did.
• Mr. Lemoncello’s Library was just ok.  My kids LOVED them and that’s why I finished reading them whole series but I thought they were just fair.  The stories were fun but just not as high quality as I prefer to spend our read aloud time reading.
• This year in Classical Conversations we studied ancient history, including Greek mythology, so toward the end of the year we started reading the Percy Jackson series.  The kids have really loved these and made a lot of connections to what they’d learned this year.
• And a mention for one we did NOT finish…the first Wingfeather book.  This is such a hugely recommended series but we tried reading the first one and just could not get in to it.  We finally gave it up and will perhaps try it again in a couple of years or listen to audio version where the author reads it or see if the older kids want to read it to themselves.