Some books demand to be read aloud. The importance of reading stories aloud to children has already been explained in far more interesting and factual ways than I could do here, but let me step up on my soapbox for a second and defend the importance of reading aloud with a child even after she has become a confident reader.
No matter what your age, there is a joy to telling and listening to a story aloud, a joy which traces back to before words were written down at all. Reading aloud not only helps with fluency and creating a teacher-student/parent-child/friend-friend bond; it also brings the story alive in a whole new way. My mother and I would read books aloud at night well into my junior high years, taking turns reading alternating chapters (although I’d never admit that to my friends). Even in college, my roommate and I would read each other snippets from our books or little anecdotes before we went to sleep. Reading together is enjoyable in the same way that watching a movie or a TV show with someone else who appreciates it. You laugh together at the jokes, you yell in astonishment, you feel the same sense of awe at a perfectly woven sentence that pulls you both somewhere impossible and wonderful for a few moments.
The following are seven classics that only serve as a starting point. If you haven’t read them, please do. If you have, read them again, this time aloud to someone who will beg to know, “What happens next?”
With the bedtime storyteller in mind, I’ve given an estimate of how many nights the story would take to read, assuming that the reader would be devoting 20-30 minutes a night for reading.
The Story Stall 