Our two book lists, Books that Build Character and Books We Enjoyed as Kids, were compiled in the 1990s long before we started our tutoring business. At that point in time, we were both educators who were also parents raising our young children. Knowing our background, and hearing what we were doing in the education world and also seeing what we were doing with our family, there were many other parents, particularly in our church community, who were coming to us regularly for advice and book recommendations related to reading materials for their children. Because both of us were educators and parents, and avid readers ourselves, many of our friends kept asking us to recommend books for their children to read. Around 1998, we put our two book lists online and simply began referring people to them. Over the years, many people have contacted us expressing their appreciation for these lists of recommendations. So, in 2024 (27 years later!), when we took our original website down, we kept these book lists and merged them into our tutoring website so that they could still remain available.
So, welcome!
Book Lists to Develop the Mind and Heart
Whether you came here on purpose or just stumbled across these pages, we are glad you are interested in children’s book lists and in children’s literature for its use in character building, character education, and in education in general. We were been teachers at private schools that emphasize character building, a strong education, and the importance of literature in education, and which include a formal program in character education that incorporates children’s literature as a character building tool and an educational tool.
Educationally speaking, one of the best habits we can encourage in our children is the habit of reading. With reading, proficiency increases with practice. Even reading good literature “for fun” can have a profound effect on academic ability, because good readers can grasp and retain information much better than infrequent readers. Reading good literature educates children, helps spark creativity, uplifts their ambitions, and broadens their horizons. Even without these benefits, reading would be valuable for the single reason that it keeps children away from the television. Television makes children passive and stifles their imagination. Television viewing has been linked to shorter attention spans and increased violence in children, making it more difficult for them to learn in school. Television has also been one of the major factors in the breakdown of traditional American culture, substituting instead the “Hollywood values” of violence, immorality, and instant gratification.
Encouraging a good reading habit starts with the parents reading aloud to their small children. Children of all ages love to be read to by their parents, and a family reading time encourages a strong bond between parents and children. Furthermore, developing an appetite for good literature early in life gives children a great head start toward developing a habit that will help them the rest of their life.
In our two lists, we roughly categorized the books by reading level: Beginning readers (picture books), elementary readers, intermediate readers, and advanced readers. However, all of the books on this list are fun even for adults to come back to and enjoy! Click here to see our children’s reading list, Books We Enjoyed As Kids.
Literature for Character Building
As educators, we firmly believe that the primary benefit of a good education, and in fact the primary purpose of education itself, is to develop and train character in children. One of the main tools used in an effective program of character building and character education, both at home and at school, is children’s literature. After numerous requests from friends and parents for children’s book lists of wholesome children’s literature or children’s book recommendations for children’s books to be used in character education, we have developed two children’s literature book lists. We have a general reading list for children and teens, titled “Books We Enjoyed As Kids,” which is a book list of wholesome children’s books, and another children’s literature book list, “Books that Build Character,” which is a more specific list of books that model or teach a particular character trait.
We also wrote a short article for Christian parents to explain why and how we use literature as a character education tool. Children’s literature can be very useful both in education in general and in character education in particular, because the role models in good children’s literature model the virtues in which we wish to educate our children.
These book lists of children’s literature can be used as a summer reading list, as a reference for a program of home character education and character building, or (as we have done) in a formal program of character education at school.
After sharing our book lists, we got so many requests for information on where to find these children’s books that we began building links to sources right in the children’s book list and character education book list itself.
Also check out the following pages:
- Literature as a character education tool, our explanation (mainly for Christian parents) of how children’s literature can be used in character education and character building.
- Books that Build Character, the book list of children’s literature for character education.
- Books We Enjoyed As Kids, our general list of recommended books.
- How to Find Old Books, a simple reference to some online resources for tracking down some of the older titles on our lists.
Additional Note for Christian Parents
There is a number of fantastic new children’s books being written every year. And, at the same time, there is also a trend to “dumb down” the writing and also to appeal to the basest instincts possible in order to (supposedly) “hook” children on reading. As a consequence, many “children’s books” on the library shelves are not what Christian parents would consider appropriate reading for their children. And some of the recent children’s “literature,” while educationally more beneficial than television, is still full of amoral values that we do not want transmitted to our children. We want the children to read, but we want them to read wholesome books, too. Hence, this list of good children’s books. It is helpful to have a curated list of recommendations–a place to start in obtaining quality books for your children or students to read.
There were also hundreds of very high quality children’s books written in the 1930s through 1960s that are impossible to find on most library shelves today. Even though they are excellent literature but have become harder to find and less familiar to the general public in recent years. Hopefully we can help point you to some of those resources.
Our list, Books that Build Character, includes books that are not only good literature, but also have an excellent moral message. We did our best to choose books that were not overtly “preaching” a particular moral, but modeled it in the way that the characters developed.
In our general reading list, Books We Enjoyed as Kids, we did not select the books in this list based on their educational value or their moral message, but rather just tried to select books that are wholesome and that provide good, entertaining reading. Some of these are our favorite books from childhood; others are books we discovered for our students or our children.
This page and all its contents are © 1998 Stephen & Esther Johnsen. All rights reserved. If you have comments or suggestions about this page, please email us.
