10 Classic Books to Revisit With Your Kids This Year

Amelia Bedelia

An awful lot of us remember Amelia Bedelia. She's been around since 1963. The literal-minded maid is still a huge hit with kids (who are just as literally-minded), as the ratings of the recently released 50th edition can attest to.

I still remember the "well-dressed chicken."

Harriet the Spy

A great, complex book with a strong female character for adolescents. Harriet is 11, she wants to be a spy, and makes observations about the people around her. But her friends find her spy notebook and then none of them like her anymore. There's a lot of themes going on in Harriet the Spy that make this book a ripe choice for introducing an older child to critical reading skills - and for the consequences of more complicated social behaviours.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle

I remember being in Grade 1 and discovering a badly-mauled copy of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle on the bottom of the school library shelves. It didn't take me long to fall in love with the woman who lived in an upside-down house, was once married to a pirate, and had the most astonishing cures for kids who hated baths, who misbehaved, or who were slow eater tiny bite takers. While many social values of the book show their age, the book's fantastically exaggerated "cures" are still highly entertaining.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Forget the movies. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was one of my favourite bedtime stories, and the land of Chewandswallow (where everything you eat will fall from the sky) will likely capture your children's imagination as well.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

I can't imagine this one NOT making a top 10 classic books list. The caterpillar who eats his way through the boards of this book is virtually guaranteed to be one of your child's favourites. It was one of the very first my little reader would read over and over on his own after just learning to talk, when he still called the main character "dat-er-pidder" and yelled "POP" every time it hatched.