Our Family's Favorite Picture Books

vintage beatrix potter figurines and books display

Best Children’s Books

In this post, I wanted to share our family’s favorite picture books! If you’d like to grab the list of 50 favorites I compiled, scroll to the bottom and grab the freebie! 🙂

One of my favorite things to do, as a child, was read. I loved curling up on my top bunk with a good book–complete with a menagerie of Beanie Babies and various library softcovers sticking out from my lavender blankets.

In fifth grade, it was 1999, and our teacher had us complete a Millenium Scrapbook. This writing/scrapbooking project had lots of requirements, including pasting in magazine artices and photos of current events, celebrities, fads, and sports news. Among these cultural records, we also had to do some personal reflection.

One of the assignments was to imagine our life 20-25 years from then, and write about it. As you can see below, I had quite the list! I wrote that I wanted to go to Wheaton College (I did!), live in a blue house with two bathrooms and four bedrooms (I do!) have two children (I have four!) and be a first grade teacher. I love looking at mementos like these, and reflecting on what went on in my preteen mind. My love for teaching, and books, has always been evident.

Building a classroom library…

My passion for treading continued into high school and college, and when I was placed in a first-grade classroom for my student teaching practicum, I started my official “classroom library” collection. I wanted to start out my teaching career with a diverse collection of books for my students to explore. I scoured garage sales, book fairs, and thrift stores and slowly built up my future-classroom library. My fiancé (now-husband) would groan at the weight of my plastic Target bins when he helped me move back and forth to new dorm rooms and apartments during college–it turns out, books are pretty heavy! 😉

In an unexpected & impromptu series of events, after getting married, I ended up moving out of the country for my first teaching experience. That extensive classroom library I had worked on sat untouched for a few years as I taught other places {in Spanish, instead of English}! When we returned home and planted roots, I remember leafing through the dozens (ok, probably hundreds) of beginning-readers and chapter books, beloved from my own childhood, ready to utilize them in my own idyllic first grade classroom–just as I had always dreamed of.

colorful children s book display on wooden stand

…for a classroom that was not to be.

The funny thing is…life doesn’t always go as planned. I never did get my first grade classroom! I ended up doing some private tutoring for Guatemalan and Korean students, teaching middle school Spanish, and teaching Spanish Immersion Kindergarten. The specific, literary-rich first grade classroom I had envisioned from childhood, was not to be.

When I had my first son, I left teaching to stay home with him. I never planned on homeschooling–truly! I didn’t think I would like it. {In hindsight, this seems nuts!} But, because of many factors that I can discuss in another post, we took the leap in 2023, and never looked back.

brown and blue wooden chairs beside white wall

My favorite part of homeschooling…and parenting!

My absolute favorite thing to do with my kids–all four of them, at all ages–is read to them. I think it relaxes all of our nervous systems. It resets us. It bonds us. It encourages conversation, snuggles, curiosity, and creativity. Sometimes my kids make connections to other stories we’ve read, places we’ve been, or people we know. They see patterns in plotlines, or characters, or conflicts. My daughter loves to recreate the stories–both the illustrations and the text. She writes her own spinoffs, like seven-year-old-fan-fiction. I love it. My littlest two (almost 2, and almost 5) mostly listen–although my preschooler seems to have a knack for geography, and has great retention for country names and famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower (thanks, Madeline!)