Summer Books for Toddlers

This post is a little bit overdue, Indi’s arrival pushed blogging out the window! However all the sitting down I’ve been doing to feed her has actually increased our reading time which is a lovely unexpected bonus! Indi’s mealtimes have become a sweet chance for the three of us to spend some quality time together as a family.

For a few weeks Alfie went through a phase of wanting to discuss his books and label the drawings rather than read them. Thankfully we’re finally out of that phase and back enjoying our stories.

Here’s what he’s been enjoying over the last while.

Our Toddler Books For Summer

The Little Book of Garden Bird Songs

Wow! Every home should have this book, it is stunningly illustrated and full of great information. The best thing though are the bird songs, they’re just stunning. Alfie reads this and plays the melodies dozens of times a day and it’s been lovely to have the house full of sweet songs.

He’s already learnt to identify the Crow, Blackbird and Robin by sight and song. He will pick them out now if he hears or sees one outside. If you visit our Insta page and check out the ‘Books’ story highlight you’ll find a clip of the songs.

British Wildlife

Wow! Another absolute gem of a book. Admittedly I bought this book for myself fully expecting that Alfie would be too young for it. How wrong I was!

This book is one of his favourites. The illustrations are realistic and very detailed and we’ve both learnt a lot from it.

Up In The Leaves

What a stunning book and a brilliant story! The true story is about a boy who loves to climb and grows up to live in and eventually care for the trees of Central Park. Alfie’s bird fascination and his Grandad’s habit of sticking him in the oak at the end of their garden means that the detailed illustrations of this book captivated him.

As an aside I LOVE that this story features a character who defines success for themselves and refuses to be pigeonholed into what they ‘should’ do. This is a very important message to pass on to our children.

Sonya’s Chickens

A beautiful and poignant story about the life cycle and dangers of keeping hens. (I feel I should mention this book contains the death of a chicken and an illustration of a fox with a hen in it’s mouth.)

It’s one of my favourite children’s stories because of the message it contains about respecting animals and their behaviour. The way it represents the power of a mother’s love gives me all the feels whenever I read it.

Little Master Cervantes: Don Quixote

I was really excited to get this book but slightly let down to see that it was just a vocabulary list as opposed to a retelling of the great work!

Neither of us really liked the way the illustrations were repeated and Alfie has yet to want to read this.

Rock Pool Secrets

This book was another surprise success. Alfie chose it from a display in the library and usually those are impulse choice that he ignores once he gets home.

The illustrations are very detailed and this book uses real, accurate language to describe what the shoreline. Although it’s non-fiction it’s very fun and reads more like a story.

Out of The Blue

This is a lovely wordless book that Alfie liked playing eye-spy with. He’s not at the creating story stage yet but was able to follow a story as I made it up from picture to picture and out would sometimes tell it back to me.

I really value love children’s books without words for the creativity opportunities they provide and the mix of page layouts makes this one especially nice.

Mog and the V.E.T.

We just love the Mog series in our house. These books represent pets as animals (so they don’t talk or fly!) which is nice! This particular book is funny little story about what happens when Mog goes to the vet, spoiler alert…it’s chaos!

We recently bought the whole Mog collection from The Book People and Alfie is loving it. I’m a little sick of her!

Bug Hotel

Bug Hotel is informative and gorgeous, I love the collage and printing effect of the illustrations. The language in this book is just great, it’s ‘adult’ accurate not just child accurate! I’m always disappointed when an otherwise lovely children’s book is dumbed down!

A few weeks ago Alfie discovered bugs! Since then we’ve had hours of fun hunting caterpillars, ants and spiders – although Bees remain his most thrilling introduction!