Recommended Reading

Hi Friends,

Birth to Pre-school is an amazing time to share the love of reading with children.  “The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home” by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise states that, “The best early teaching you can give your child is to immerse them in language from birth”.

In a 2018 scholarly culture study conducted by Joanna Sikora of the Austrailian National University, states, “Children growing up in homes with many books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class.”  Stated simply, just the presences of books in the home improves cognitive outcomes.  This is of course is a generalization, but overall the hypothesis is that children’s outcomes improve by the mere presences of books. 

No one is recommending Beauty and the Beast style castle library in your home.  Do what you can, to provide what you can, the best you know how.  The local library is a great place to start.  Library cards are free and can open unlimited knowledge to your child.  The local library may also have a discount book store.  Our library hosts a book store that sells donated books at a discounted price to support our local library.  Other resources include consignment stores or kids consignment events that often have books at deep discount.  Interactive books and board books also make great first birthday gifts!

This post shares with you some great reading resources to start reading with your toddler. Book images in this pose include amazon affiliate links and ads. I may receive commission from clicks or purchases from this site. Clicking on the book image will open a new tab for shopping books from this list. The book images also provide a reference for library browsing.

Here are 10 recommended interactive books for babies and toddlers.  

• Cloth books or crinkle books

Is it a book or is it a teething toy?  Does it really matter?  Cloth books and crinkle books make some of the best first toys.  These books are great for exploring sights and sounds in a book.  Some cloth books come with interactive pages to develop motor skills for older babies or young toddlers. 

• B is for Bear Touch and Feel ABC Book by Roger Priddy

No toddler book list is complete without a touch and feel ABC book.  This one B is for Bear by Roger Priddy combines ABC learning, word rhyming, and interactive pictures to make this book a fun reading experience.  This was one of my children’s favorites as toddlers and was easy to memorize because of the picture cues and rhyming.  

• Poke-a-Dot Old McDonald’s Farm by Melissa and Doug

The Poke-a-Dot books by Melissa and Doug are super cute way to introduce toddlers to the Pop-It fidget craze that the older kids are doing.  The Old McDonald’s Farm book by Melissa and Doug will have your toddler poking and counting and singing and reading!

• Poke-a-Dot Colors by Melissa and Doug

The Poke-a-dot colors book by Melissa and Doug is a second favorite to Old McDonald’s Farm but still provides lots of opportunity to interactive with the book while you read about the colors.  Read the book while your child pops the dots.  By reading to your child they learn the parts of a book.  They will be able to show you the front cover, hold the book right side up, and place their finger on the words and move left to right.  All of these things are foundational to reading. 

• Everything I know about…The Clock by Kathryn Knight

This is a great story about the day in the life of a toddler.  Breakfast, play, lunch, nap, play, dinner, bath, and then bedtime. Rinse and repeat.  This book is great for teaching numbers, and the analog clock is fun for toddlers to play with as the day moves through the book.   

• Where is Baby’s Belly Button? by Karen Kratz

No interactive book list is complete without some lift-the-flap books.  This interactive book explores the parts of baby’s body.  Learning all of the names of the body parts is classic language learning made more fun with lift-the-flap.  The risk of flaps being ripped off is high with toddlers so be sure to set your expectations low.  This might be a good time to explain to toddlers how to be gentle with books and lift-the-flap carefully.  Still you’re likely to lose some flaps along the way.  Several of ours were taped back on before eventually being lost to the chaos.  

• Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt

“Pat the Bunny” by Dorothy Kunhardt is a classic interactive book. This spiral bound 20 pager has paper pages and is great for supervised reading.  Our copy of this book didn’t last very long, as it does not stand up well to “aggressive play’.  Maybe a great book to have at grandma’s house for interactive reading time.         

• Where’s Spot by Eric Hill

The board book version of “Where’s Spot” is adapted from the 1980 color picture book.  “Where’s Spot” is a lift-the-flap book that follows the playful puppy’s adventures.  “Where’s Spot” is part of a larger family of books that explore the many adventures of Spot. 

• Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell

Looking for the perfect pet at the zoo is not ideal.  It takes a lot of flap lifting to find the perfect fit.  This book explores zoo animals and has repetitive text that makes this an easy first read or first memorize book for toddlers or preschoolers.

• Where’s Baby’s Christmas Present? Karen Kratz

Baby searches the whole house for his Christmas present. This is a great interactive book for the holidays.  This book would be a great stocking stuffer. A lift the flap book is probably the only book I would recommend as a new purchase.  You want your child to be able to experience all of the flaps intact and spit-up free!   

Remember what Gretchen Rubin says, “The days are long but the years are short”.  Spend those long days playing with books and those moments will never be wasted.