Looking for children's book recommendations.

[rivka]

I know that there are some parents of early readers on my friends list (naomikritzer, wiredferret, kcobweb...) and also some librarians. And of course probably most of the people who read my LJ were early and omnivorous readers yourselves. I'm looking for some suggestions.

Alex's reading has taken off in a big way recently. (Most frequent phrase out of our mouths these days: "Put down the book and [wash your hands for dinner/brush your teeth/put your coat on/eat your lunch/etc. etc. etc.]")

She's got her own children's-easy-series books that she's tearing through independently and in a hurry: Magic Tree House, Disney Fairies, Secrets of Droon, et cetera. But she's also now capable of reading what I think of as "regular" chapter books: books which are just there to tell stories, instead of being explicitly constructed to have a limited vocabulary, simple sentence structures, and lots of repetition. For example, Toys Go Out and Toy Dance Party are current hits (and much recommended).

Here are the characteristics I'm looking for:

• Good books of reasonable literary quality, at roughly a middle-elementary reading level. Toys Go Out is rated at a fourth-grade reading level, and it seemed to be about right. Something she might need a bit of help with is fine.


• Either fiction or nonfiction is good. Alex particularly loves history.


• Content appropriate for a five- or six-year-old. This means, on the one hand, an absence of long elevated descriptive passages, and on the other hand, an absence of socially realistic depictions of child abuse, romance as a main theme, scary violence, etc.


• Not excessively focused on social conflicts between kids and the social milieu of school. Alex might read like an eight-year-old, but she is squarely five on a social level, and she just doesn't get books that focus on girls being catty to each other and school playground dynamics. Which a lot of contemporary books at this level seem to do.

Thanks for any suggestions you can give me! Books which aren't Important Children's Classics are particularly welcome, because I've already gotten a bunch of suggestions from lists that focus on that type of thing.

Edited to add an additional characteristic I'm looking for: Because Alex is a fairly new reader, I want to avoid heavy use of dialect ("Hit's an 'orse, guvnor!") and weird language use for now. We can deal with that sort of thing in read-alouds, though.

Also edited to compile a list of particularly likely suggestions:
Farley Mowatt: Owls in the Family, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be
Ransome: Swallows and Amazons
Grace Lin: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
American Girls series
Joan Aiken: Arabel and Mortimer
Kate Di Camillo: The Tale of Despereaux
Michael Bond: Paddington Bear
Bunnicula
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
Encyclopedia Brown
Clyde Robert Bulla historical fiction
Astrid Lindgren: Children of Noisy Village
Mordecai Richler: Jacob Two Two

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Some that Molly enjoyed at this stage:

* The Beezus and Ramona books by Beverly Cleary
* Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and its sequels (she's added several since I was a kid) by Judy Bloom
* The Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books
* The Great Brain series (set in Utah in the late 1800s, this is historical fiction about the unfortunately gullible younger brother of a born con man)

And a short time later:
* The Anastasia Krupnik series by Lois Lowry. (Though beware: Anastasia At This Address runs a plot that was probably purely humorous in the 1980s and reads a lot creepier now.)
* The Babysitter's Club. (My sister joked that at least she was getting this phase out of the way early.)
* Nancy Drew (actually, check for these now; there are now younger-kid versions of Nancy Drew that are mysteries written at a somewhat simpler level).

[rhymeswithtruculent.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Seconding The Great Brain recommendation. I loved those, and still love them, and have found most of them in used bookshops (after years of looking and finding nothing).

The nice thing about the series is that while the focus is always on the latest con, there's a lot of everyday historical detail that gets recorded in the stories, and I think Alex might enjoy that.