Long Winter Reads

Snuggle Up with These Books

Need to kill some extra time at home with the kids without big messes or lots of noise? Maybe you’ve missed a few nights of reading and want to snuggle up for a good long book. Traveling long distance and need to get more out of books you bring? Try these selections to enjoy more quality reading time together or for kids on their own.

Richard Scarry: You can’t go wrong with some of these oversized picture books from Richard Scarry. We favor Cars and Trucks and Things That Go on Amazon. This classic story of the pig family setting off on their picnic and passing an imaginative variety of vehicles appeals to kids of many ages. Plus, it combines the long story and detailed illustrations with the fun and time consuming search for the ever present Goldbug. You can also check out Hop Aboard! Here We Go! on Amazon. Roger and Flip take a ride on just about every category of vehicle, for any child interested in cars, boats, trains, or airplanes. Busy, Busy Town (also on Amazon) can’t be beat for intricate cartoon pictures that are sure to capture the attention of any child, and offer lots of talking points to make the reading last even longer, but any of his popular picture books will do the job.

Usborne Big Books: These big books offer giant fold out pages that go in depth with facts and figures about a variety of topics. Have a child who’s obsessed with spaceships? This book can keep them intrigued indefinitely. You can choose to read all the small text, or only focus on the pictures that interest your child when you need to cut down on reading time, so it offers lots of flexibility in duration. We own both the trains and dinosaurs books, but they come in many more themes, such as big machines.

Look and Find Books: Maybe you prefer for your kid to entertain themselves with books. Then look no further than look and find books. These types of books focus on illustrations and finding items instead of stories. Each page spread contains a list of numbered items. Kids can search for every item on the page to use more time, or choose a select few to speed up the process. You can get different types of look and find books geared towards different interests and attention spans, ranging from a few items per page to more than a 1000 things to find per book.

Usborne Story Collections: Finally, if you want to read more stories, check out Usborne’s story collections. These books compile all the stories about certain characters in one big book. While they might be heavy to haul around, they earn their weight in duration. Filled with short stories, you can read one or all of them to take up as much time as you have.  As an added bonus, some versions come with CDs so kids can listen on their own.