Now that our son turned two years old, we’ve had plenty of favorite toddler books up to this point. If you have a toddler, your baby may love a book for a day, a week, or longer, but that could change anytime. Hopefully, a new book will take the place of the old ones, even sometimes temporarily. Your toddler will often return to a familiar favorite for a time. We typically read to our son before bedtime to help him be calm enough to fall asleep independently. Now, we’re grateful that he will pick out his book. He picks one, and we pick one. That’s how we do it at our house. But any routine that gets the child still for reading could be good.
Reading a book is the perfect transition from what may be fussy moments during bathtime, brushing teeth, and getting dressed for bed, especially when the baby is teething or not feeling well. We try to stick to the routine as much as possible unless it just doesn’t work out for that night, and we need to get to bed as quickly as possible. But we’ve found that a few books have the right combination of storytelling, a good message, length, creativity, and artwork that put them at the top of our list. Here are a few of our favorites we think you may like to try if you haven’t already.
Favorite Toddler Books: Steam Train Dream Train
It’s hard to ignore the adorable nature of this book that details the locomotive journey through the middle of the night. The steam train dream train picks up passengers along the way, including a diverse set of stuffed animals. The destination is a good night’s sleep, but along the way, the train does its part to ensure no one gets left out. It makes the stops along the way, helping everyone get to a good, safe night’s sleep. It even helps the readers to get to sleep as well. That’s the best part!
Steam Train Dream Train is a genius story because it makes bedtime adventurous. The child wants to be a part of the exciting world that the train is journeying through, and it makes the reader happy to arrive at the final destination of going to sleep! That’s one of the reasons this selection is a great choice and could be a regular option in your favorite toddler books if you make it through the book without falling asleep first! But really, this is a great solid book that you should enjoy.
Good Night Good Night Construction Site
This favorite is similar to steam train dream train in some ways, such as the size and length of the book and that it is also a bedtime story. But it’s unique enough to stand independently as a go-to and one of the books we love to read together. In this classic baby book, the construction site is all set to call it quits after a long hard day of work. Each piece of equipment is creatively put to sleep.
But along the way, the hidden gem in this book is that it teaches about construction machines. We get introduced to them as they are preparing for their nightly snooze. This book is brilliant in how it introduces the setting and gives life, and appreciation, to the hard work that all construction site residents do. We love this choice because, like Steam Train Dream Train, everyone, even the parents, is a little sleepy by the end of the book! Give it a try. We think you will like it!
Little Blue Truck
The Little Blue Truck is a recreation of the classic book The Little Engine That Could. Little Blue Truck masterfully retells the story by inviting animals from the neighborhood and the farm into the story. We won’t give away the whole story, but it’s a great story for everyone, especially children because it reminds us that we should think about helping one another whenever we can. It also has a subtle message about the power of organic community and helping out the industrial machines we’ve created.
We won’t dwell on this, but who needs help from whom in this story is interesting. For kids, the story gives a great opportunity to read along with prose and cadence that allows the readers to almost sing along to the tune of the wonderful writing. The lines are memorable as we may remember the lines from The Little Engine That Could. I would always read the lines to that book as though the whistle from the locomotive was directing the tune.
But anyhow, the little blue truck story is so well presented that it won’t take long for you and your child to read the words together in harmony. The only thing that I would recommend about this book is to mix it up with other books as much as possible. It won’t be surprising if this becomes your #1 go-to for a while. But it will help to extend how long you read this jewel if you try to work in other bedtime stories when you can. Yes, it’s that good.
Conclusion
These books for toddlers are not a complete list by any means, but if you have a toddler sooner or later, there’s a good chance that at least one of these excellent options will appear in your library. We found it helpful to both try to give our child the freedom to choose the book whenever possible and to encourage reading different books both for development and so that we could read them for longer without tiring of them. They are worth the effort to spread their use as long as possible.
Check back often, as we will update this book with more of our favorites soon!
