Reply to Best illustrated read-aloud chapter books for 4.5 y/o

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[quote=Anonymous]I'd reiterate what everyone is saying about picture books. The vocabulary can be pretty complex and I wouldn't skip over them to get to chapter books.

A couple ideas:

(1) Fairy tales. These stories are really fundamental in our culture because of all the literary references. Consider Mary Hoffman's "A First Book of Fairy Tales." Of course, the Andrew Lang, Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson versions are far more complex, but it's important to get a grasp on the basic story first, and your child can internalize the stories by reading them many times over. 
(2) Wider folk tale/mythology literature. My daughter loved "The Seal Prince" (retold by Sheila MacGill Callahan) as well as some of the Warwick Hutton retellings of Greek myths. Again, this builds a foundation for later reading.
(3) Books about history. Don't worry about chronology right now, and instead get a feel for what it would be like to live in different time periods. Examples: Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed; Jackrabbit McCabe and the Electric Telegraph; When Jesse Came Across the Sea (this one may be a little more advanced, but my daughter's enjoyed it well enough).
(4) Books about science. Magic Schoolbus is fantastic for this, and will give your child a vocabulary and a little bit of a structure to pick up these topics in greater detail later. 
(5) Poetry. Getting an intrinsic feel for rhyming will help with phonics and learning to read later. The Shel Silverstein poems are probably too advanced and the humor will fly over your child's head, but you could try A.A. Milne, or even just a good copy of Mother Goose. My daughter's preschool class memorized a short Robert Frost poem last year, and she occasionally still repeats a couple lines of it here and there.

Finally, one obscure suggestion that my daughter loves: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mr. Bliss. He wrote it for his children, and the silliness really appeals well to preschoolers. Pictures on nearly every page. [/quote]

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