Recommendations for Intelligent Toddler

So, my 2.5 year old is (according to her pediatrician) on a 4-4.5 year old level of comprehension and understanding, and she is bored with a lot of her toddler books.

She loves fairy tales, Sesame Street, anything to do with talking animals, adventures, Winnie-The-Pooh, Dr. Suess, etc. But what I'm seeing is a weird gap between babyish toddler books, and books for kindergarten and up. There's very little in between.

Right now we're reading beyond her true comprehension because she likes the illustrations and the stories (as in, she enjoys the story but doesn't understand the moral of it or whatever) and because her attention span allows her to sit there and listen to a long story. (She will listen to me read The Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland without getting bored and fed up.) Her personal library has over 300 books. A lot are way past what she can handle (Nancy Drew, Rhode Dahl, children's poetry, and stuff like that I'm saving for later) and a lot are too babyish for her like about colors or animal sounds and stuff. I need some middle of the road stuff until she's ready for even longer stories and can understand emotions and stuff a bit better.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

>1 jordanlrduncan: Have you tried Julia Donaldson's books? My niece (almost 3) enjoys some of hers and they're also popular with the early years children at school. More of a story than the toddler books definitely, plenty of repetition or predictable language so that children can begin to join in with the reading and after a few reads will give the reading a go themselves (re-telling the story) or for when they're beginning to read independently they can return to them and put their reading knowledge with the familiarity of the stories to get themselves through. Stories include Room on the Broom, The Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale and The Highway Rat amongst many others.

Also the Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy books by Lynley Dodd which follow the adventures of a little dog and his friends.

I love Hairy Maclary!! I cannot read those books out loud without bouncing. I can't sit still!

I wouldn't worry too much about her comprehension of the morals and whatnot if she's enjoying the stories. I can name any number of kids books I liked much better until somebody told me what they "really were about". My 4.5 year old daughter is always "listening in" on whatever her big brother is reading and it hasn't seemed to harm her much.

I confess I'm not sure what you mean by a lack of books between the baby books and books for kindergartners. So I'm just going to list some of the stuff my particular 4.5 year old girl has enjoyed over the last couple of years and still likes.

You might try some of the Golden Books - particularly some of the classics like The Tawny Scrawny Lion or Scuffy the Tugboat. My daughter also loves the Golden Book Disney retellings (much better than she likes the actual Disney movies as it happens). We found a stack of about 15 of these at a yard sale a few years back and they have been wonderful.

The Berenstain Bears is another sprawling series that would work for a younger listener. No, she won't understand all of them yet, but many of them are pretty comprehensible (bad dreams, a new baby, etc.).

The Beatrix Potter books are actually another option if you haven't tried them yet (they would seem to fit in with Pooh and Alice to me). My daughter particularly liked The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Likewise Curious George.

You didn't mention ballet, but one popular series for that with the preschool set is Angelina Ballerina. My daughter also really likes the Belinda the Ballerina books.

There is also, of course, the ever-silly If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series. They aren't complex but they're fun and not really babyish. Most of the preschoolers I know also seem to love the Froggy series by Jonathan London.

The Ella Bella Ballerina and Katie (eg. Katie Meets the Impressionists) books by James Mayhew are a really lovely introduction to ballets and art respectively.

Almost anything by Kevin Henkes is great -- try Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse or Wemberly Worried.

The trilogy of Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine and Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey are classics for good reason.

I would also encourage the idea of non-fiction books. My kids really enjoy those and you can get them on pretty much anything she likes. We've done frogs, ducks, ballet dancers, stars, black holes, bubbles, seeds, egypt,.... you get the idea. Definitely a library sort of thing though.

Other random titles that I seem to read a lot:
*Piggy's Pancake Parlor by David McPhail
*Tiger Can't Sleep and Read to Tiger by S. J. Fore
*The Gingerbread Girl and The Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers by Lisa Campbell Ernst
*Callie Cat, Ice Skater by Eileen Spinelli
*Seeds, Seeds, Seeds, or really anything else, by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
*The Mud Fairy by Amy Young
*Dream Big, Little Pig! by Kristi Yamaguchi
*Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton (my son preferred Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel )
*The Mitten by Jan Brett
*Flotsam by David Wiesner

Definitely seconding the James Mayhew, Kevin Henkes, and Laura Numeroff books as well as the Curious George series. Also agree that you can find simple nonfiction books from the library based on topics of interest. In addition, easy readers for older kids actually tend to work with toddlers as the simple language and short stories for beginner readers also fits with most toddlers' attention spans/vocabulary/comprehension. My toddler class (ages 2.5 to 3) likes Fancy Nancy a lot. We also read one of the Frog and Toad books this week. I thought they would only sit still for one story but we ended up reading the whole book (in two separate sittings).

Since you mentioned Sesame Street, the kids in my class absolutely LOVE the book Red or Blue, I Like You. This might fall into the problem you're having of not understanding the moral, but I think introducing an idea even if they don't get it yet is not necessarily a bad thing as long as they paying attention and enjoying the reading process. They also like Elmo's Good Manners Game, although that is fairly simple in comparison.

Some other random books that I starred and noted that my toddler class liked:
Five Green and Speckled Frogs
Bugs Galore
Are You my Mother?
A Drop of Rain
One Moose, Twenty Mice
Ten Black Dots
Go to Sleep, Groundhog
Geoffrey Groundhog Predicts the Weather
Ten Grouchy Groundhogs
Press Here
Honk! Honk!
One Smart Goose
Big Dog, Little Dog
Knuffle Bunny (Mo Willems' Pigeon books are fun, too.)
Bear and Bee
I Took the Moon for a Walk
How Are You Peeling?
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Books by Rosemary Wells including the Max and Ruby stories and many others.

Also books by John Burningham like Come Away from the Water Shirley and Avocado Baby

All the Little Bear books by Minarik

Anything by James Marshall - Three Up a Tree and Three by the Sea and Rats on the Roof and many others.

I'm surprised that she's bored by poetry, since there's so much of it--
A Child's Garden of Verses
Day of Rhymes
The Owl and the Pussycat
Lots and lots of Victorian poetry as long as it's not morbid.

My daughter was one of those kids who talked often and early, taught herself to read, very bright, etc., but I don't recall having this problem. She came over for dinner tonight and I asked her about the books she had at that age:
Green Eyes
Oh, Were They Ever Happy
King Bidgood's in the Bathtub
Cookie's Week (more of a toddler book)
Old Mother West Wind (Burgess wrote a whole series of animal stories)
When she was older she read the Oz books.

She also told me of the sad demise of Reading Rainbow on PBS. She says she loved it when a book she had read was on that show. So misguided!

There are tons of picture books written for a four-year-old's comprehension level -- as a rule of thumb, look for ones that have more than a couple of words to a page, but not huge chunks of text. I agree that Kevin Henkes, Rosemary Wells, Beatrix Potter, and Robert McCloskey would be good authors to look for.