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Books Children Love is a great resource: essentially a giant annotated booklist of great books for children.
Books Children Love: A Guide to the Best Children’s Literature by Elizabeth Wilson. Crossway, 2002. 320 pages.
- Reading Level: Adults
- Recommended For: Adults
What does your child enjoy? Trains? Animals? Fairy Tales? Perhaps he loves to build things. Or perhaps she wants to grow something in the garden.
Books Children Love is one giant annotated booklist broken up into topical sub-lists. Many books-about-books give half of the book over to essays (um, our own book is mostly essays), but Books Children Love is all lists. Publication data is given with a book’s title as the heading for each entry (including age recommendations); thorough paragraph annotations follow each title heading. Twenty five chapters include Animals, Art and Architecture, Bible/Spiritual and Moral Teaching, Biography, Celebration Days and Seasons, Crafts/Hobbies/and Domestic Arts, Dance/Drama and Other Performances, Growing Plants, History and Geography, Humor, Language, Literature (levels 1, 2, and 3), Literature Anthologies, Literature (poetry), Mathematics, Miscellaneous, Music, Nature/Science/Technology, Outdoor Activities, Physical Education and Group Games, Reference and Research/Study Skills, Special Needs, and Supplemental Teaching Resources.
Whew! An entire chapter devoted to mathematics. Or to Music. Or Outdoor Activities. Clearly, this book has enormous breadth. Many of the titles included are nonfiction, far more than in most other books about children’s books. Thus, this is a true reference book for educators (home or classroom). As with all print books, this one is bound by its publication date and many listed books are now out of print. But used book sellers abound, both in person and online. And Wilson’s thorough exploration of so many topics will offer much for educators seeking to emulate Charlotte Mason’s “living books” approach to their various school subjects.
Bottom Line: Because Books Children Love is more than 20 years old, it’s worth hunting down an inexpensive copy for your own home library reference!
Recommended Reading at Redeemed Reader
- Review: Wilson’s book really only covers elementary and middle school. For a few suggestions of living books for high school, see our Niche Nonfiction list.
- Reviews: We like to say that we stand on the shoulders of giants such as Elizabeth Wilson. And we hope we’re making valuable contributions along the same lines. Consider some of the following nonfiction books that are current (i.e., in print and available) and yet similar to some of the books she included: The Big Book of Balloon Art, Rise and Fall: Great Empires That Shaped the World, or Zero! The Number That Almost Wasn’t.
- Resource: Books Children Love is a “Literary Nightstand” title: books about books.
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