Books have been a major part of our child’s life since her first week of life. We have read her several books a day from the time she was a wee little thing. I believe that habit has been one of the reasons she has become such a strong reader.
Being a homeschooler, books have a particularly prominent place in our daily lives. Tahra started reading at 2.5 years old and currently, at 4.5 years old, she is easily reading at 2nd to 3rd-grade level. We have never done a flash card, reading drill or forced her in any way, trusting, instead, that a lifelong habit of reading every night (and many days), her own curiosity, some guidance that matched how she best learned and our own love for books would take care of that.
When we started creating her book list, she said she wanted to rate them. I thought I would do the same, and the loooong spreadsheet list below was created, sorted by title, author, age group, general topic, and for some, with a rating from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) from Tahra and her mama. At the time of this post, the list, which is a work in progress, features about 800 of the books she has read.
Please note: Being secular homeschoolers, we try to give our child a very balanced education and read about all topics, countries, religions and experiences, so she can have her own thoughts, make her own choices and come to her own conclusions. We believe people need to understand other perspectives, even if it is to know why they don’t agree with them, so sheltering her from different lifestyles is absolutely not part of our lives.
The list is very incomplete, and we are still working on the ratings, but feel free to peruse, and please send suggestions in the comments below. We would love, love, love to hear about the books you have read and what your favorite ones are. Suggestions on multicultural books or stories with science and math elements are particularly welcome. Individual book reviews will come in the Summer 🙂
To view our very large list of books, please CLICK HERE
Some of our book suggestions:
