It’s time to introduce him to Mo Willems other books. The Knuffle Bunny books (there’s three now) are always a favorite. Don’t Let the Pigeon series is especially fun if you read with lots of expression. The Pigeon is a very dramatic character.
If you want timeless, go for Kevin Henkes. Sweet, classic illustrations and lovely stories that children relate to. If Firebug has a favorite blanket, Owen would be an excellent choice.
Jan Brett is a perfect choice if your son is enchanted by good illustrations. They should also be good attention stretchers for him because the prose is longer and more complex. Good read aloud books. She also likes to do fables and tall tales from other countries around the world so it’s a great way to introduce a child to another country’s oral traditions.
The Olivia books are great if your child has an imagination or tends to be a prankster. He’ll relate quite well to her.
Get him the entire Beatrix Potter collection of books. You can get all 23 stories, each as a small hardcover book, in a single box with a handle. Your son will enjoy carrying around the box. More cheaply, you can get all 23 in a single large hardback book. You can read him some now and soon he will be reading them all himself.
Head for the comic shop and stock up on the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics of Carl Barks. With Dr. Seuss, that was how I learned to read at his age. The stories are fun for the parents, too, and they even teach good values like honesty and industry.
We (my daughter and I) loved the gently subversive Squids Will be Squidsat this age. It’s one that’s growing with her, as she “gets” different ones at different ages.
Wow, I totally missed that. There are some in there that I’m still not sure on, and occasionally I’ll be reading it with my girl around another adult and we’ll start geeking out on trying to figure out the more obscure ones. My daughter tends to wander off at this point :).
I’ve put Animalia, Olivia, Where’s My Cow?, and Squids Will Be Squids on hold at the library, just for starters. I’ll be picking them up tomorrow night.
Both Animalia and The Water Hole by Graeme Base. A friend got them for our son’s third birthday, and they’re awesome enough that I forgave him for also getting him Sea Monkeys.
The D page has pictures of a Dalek and the fourth Doctor, from Doctor Who. Instant hit in our Whoobsessed household.
Might I modestly suggest one of the Who Pooped? series by your favorite* SDMB moderator? They are scat and track books for children, and my 3-year-old grandson does love them!
Or, if not your favorite mod, at least one of the top 21?
Mr. Putter and Tabby - an elderly man and his pet cat, and a neighbor lady and her pet dog. A wonderful series that is funny to children and to adults, and stands up well to rereading.
I’m looking forward to introducing Lily to The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Sure, Goodnight Moon and Guess How Much I Love You are sweet and all, but The Stinky Cheese Man is awesome - and it has legs, so to speak! IIRC, the Boy Child was about four when he first received this book, loved it from the first time I read it to him, and continued to enjoy it enough that he asked me to come read it to his third-grade class.
If you can find it, Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. (My sister ran across it years ago and loved it so much that she bought copies for the entire family. It’s a hoot.)
We finished the Dragon trilogy a few days ago. She really enjoyed. She found a bunch of her older brother’s Magic Treehouse books, so we’ve started on those now.
It might take a little searching but the Morris and Boris series is pretty popular with my 4 and 6 year-old nephews. Most the books have about three short stories so a beginning reader can tackle them himself. If your son’s starting school “Morris Goes to School” is good one.
My sister read her boys an Amelia Bedilia book a few days before their first Morris and Boris. They got the humor of Morris’ misunderstandings much better than they did Amelia’s (which seemed a bit dated even when I read them in the 80s).
