My baby is 17 months and her attention span is finally longer than 0.02 seconds, but not long enough for the stories I remember. I’m looking for toddler-friendly (length, wording) story collections, like a simplified and friendlified Brothers Grimm or something. Any ideas?
by crizzle_t_rex
5 Comments
– Richard Scarry’s Best Nursery Tales Ever
– A First Book of Fairy Tales by Mary Hoffman
– Fairy Tales and Fables by Gyo Fujikawa
Have a wonderful night. Happy reading to you and your baby. 🙂
This is still the age for picture books
Things like Good Night Moon are good
The rhythmic verse is something the baby will pick up on and learn parts of it and then it’s fun to point out details in the pic and interact asking if they can find certain things.
My First Oxford Book of Stories by Geraldine McCaughrean
The Classic Fairy Tale Treasury by Armand Eisen
There are a number of editions of Aesop’s Fables that are nicely illustrated. The morals of the stories are probably too advanced, but the stories are short and I think looking at pictures of the animals would be engaging for a young child.
Barefoot Books publishes a lot of nice storybooks.
It’s poetry, but I think Sylvia Long’s Mother Goose is great for young children. Maybe also Leaves From A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by Donna Green.
*Lavender’s Blue: A book of Nursery Rhymes* by Kathleen Lines, illustrated by Harold Jones is lovely. It’s more nursery rhymes than fairy stories. But you get a lot of the old motiffs and tales there.
More specifically for fairy tales, ours loved *Enchantment: Fairy Tales, Ghost Stories and Tales of Wonder* by Kevin Crossley-Holland. It’s for 6 -11 years. But your baby’s so young, the content of the story is almost more for you anyway. She’ll just love the sound of your voice, the atmosphere you create and the time you’re spending with her.
The Usborne See Inside Fairyland might be fun too. It’s by Susanna Davidson.
My kids didn’t have an attention span for stories until they were school aged, and even then I’d have to choose short stories and picture books. At 17 months the goal is not really the story. The goal is the bonding time and projecting the idea that reading is fun and an activity they look forward to. Get down on the ground and let them crawl all over you and play with toys while you read. They will stop and look at the pictures. At that age I’d focus on Dr Seuss and Mo Willems. Green Eggs and Ham, the Lorax, Horton Hears a Who, ABCs, all the Pigeon and Piggie books. They are short, the illustrations are engaging, and kids love repetition. As baby gets older you can upgrade to Aesop’s Fables, just choose an edition with simple language and good pictures.