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Mom's top 10 book list for toddlers

The Monitor asked parents to submit their favorite books to read with their toddlers in an informal Facebook survey. Our survey revealed that many of the books that parents cherish most are those that they remember reading as children. Here are the top ten recommendations of stories that are sure to hold up through endless readings – we can't make any promises about the pages of the book, though.

8. 'The Napping House' by Audrey Wood

  • By Noelle Swan Correspondent

Audrey Wood's "The Napping House" begins, "There is a house, a napping house, where everyone is sleeping. And in that house, there is a bed, a cozy bed, in a napping house, where everyone is sleeping." Each page builds builds on and repeats that intro, "and on that bed, there is a granny, a snoring granny, on a cozy bed, in a napping house, where everyone is sleeping." Don Wood's rich illustrations depict an increasingly full bed, until the bed frame breaks and "no one is sleeping." The step-and-repeat format encourages children to participate in the reading. "The Napping House" was first published in 1984 by Harcourt.

The husband and wife duo collaborated on the Caldecott Award winning "King Bidgood's in the Bathtub," "The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear," and "Silly Sally."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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