Mr. Popper's Penguins

by Richard and Florence Atwater. A house painter, a crate of penguins, and pure joy. We built an iceberg out of blankets and pillows before we read a single word, and that book went on to spark our very favorite unit study: penguins, poles, and a lot of fish math. You can see that unit just below.

Let them binge the series

We used a lot of book sets. More than once a child decided they only wanted to read that one series, over and over, and nothing else. I let them. It was fine, because they were reading. A kid tearing through twelve books about the same four characters is a kid who reads, and that is the whole objective. You can chase variety later.

• Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
• Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan
• Warriors by Erin Hunter
• Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland
• Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
• The Minecraft books yes, really, and they read every one

Choose Your Own Adventure

These work differently to everything else on this page, and they are worth knowing about. Your child reads a chapter, then the book stops and asks what they would do. Each choice sends them to a different page, and the story goes somewhere else entirely. Get it wrong and it can end badly, so they flip back and try the other road.

Which means the reader is not along for the ride. They are steering. For a kid who thinks reading is something done to them, a book that will not move until they decide is a different proposition altogether.

Dinosaurs, volcanoes, and Jurassic Park

My son loved the National Geographic books on dinosaurs and volcanoes, so we built unit studies around both. Same method as any novel: take the thing he could not put down and grow the rest of an education out of it.

And we ended the dinosaur one with Jurassic Park. That turned out to matter more than I expected. A unit that finishes with a film your kid has been waiting weeks for is a unit they remember, and it gives the whole thing a shape: we learned the real thing, now let us go and see what Hollywood did with it. They will spend the entire film telling you what the movie got wrong, which is how you find out what stuck.