favorite picture books for preschoolers // part one

A few weeks ago on one of our regular trips to the library the librarian asked me if I wanted to enroll my son in the summer reading program, I laughed a little and said she is a girl and signed her up.

Just a side note, I took this photo that day after we got home, I’m not exactly sure how the librarian thought she was a boy . . .

We took out loads of library books and day after day we read book after book and wrote them all down in her summer reading booklet. For every nine books we read she got a prize (a free book) and this week we finished the booklet -meaning this summer we read 45 new library books (never mind the ones we read over and over again).

Our local library does not have a very good selection of books (which actually surprises me) but thankfully we can request books from libraries all over the province and they get delivered to our library where I can pick them up. I found a lot of books for 2-4 year olds suggested on What We Do All Day and I ended up requesting about 50 of them.

I thought I would share a few of our favorite books that we’ve read so far this summer -ones that Raeca has loved and asked for me to read over and over again and ones that I thought were good and reading them over and over again didn’t make me want to pull all my hair out.

First up, anything by Oliver Jeffers, though Raeca’s favorites have been: The Way Back Home, Lost and Found and How to Catch a Star. I love the illustrations because I can look at them and think – I could do that!
Spork – a great little tale that shares that it is okay (and great even) to be different
Around the World Safari – every page shares a different country and I had fun making Raeca say the country names each time we read it; South Africa, France, Australia, China, Kenya . . .
Crafty Chloe – Raeca loved this one so much it had to sleep in her bed the entire time we had it out

Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs – so much funnier than the original story which makes it much more interesting for parents to read

Clink – a story of a little robot that just wants to belong to someone, so many great parallels between this story and adoption

Those have been our absolute favorites this summer, what are some of the books you read over and over to your kids?

 with love,
Chantel