Books You Should Read to Your Kids from First to Fourth Grade

The books on these lists are not a joke. Yes, there are some "big" books on this list, but the point is that you are the one reading them to the child, and not the other way around. The key here is to expose children to beautiful prose and poems, and form a lifelong bond with them at the same time. Not only that, but reading to children helps them​ acquire literacy naturally.

Make it a habit. Choose a regular time each day to read the books. 

Grade One

• Beowulf
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Canterbury Tales
• The Fairie Queen
• William Shakespeare
• Shakesspeare can be fun series
• Seamus Heaney
• The Inferno

 
Grade Two

• The Odyssey
• The Iliad
• Greek and Roman Myths
• Aesop’s Fables
• Egyptian Myths
• Indian Folktales
• African Folktales
• English, Irish, Welsh folktales

Grade 3

• John Milton
• Robinson Crusoe
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Pilgrim’s Progress
• Les Miserabeles
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• The Three Muskateers
• Songs of Innocence
• William Wordsworth
• Jane Austen
• Lord Tennyson
• Robert Browning
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol
• Edward Lear
• Lewis Carroll
• Mark Twain
• James Fenimore Cooper novels
• Jules Verne novels
• Norwegian folktales
• Moby Dick

Grade 4

• Robert Louis Stevenson novels and poems
• Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes
• Heidi
• Pinocchio
• HG Wells
• Louisa May Alcott
• Andrew Lang
• Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Peter Pan
• The Jungle Book
• Beatrix Potter
• Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Carl Sandburg
• TS Eliot