Looking for some favorite read-alouds for families with teens? Here are our favorites!
Favorite Read-Alouds for Families with Teens
You never outgrow read-alouds. Even my adult kids will get together just for read-alouds (they are partial to Icelandic sagas and folk tales on those times).
When looking for new favorite read-alouds for families with teens, here are a few guidelines that can help:
- Choose a book that may challenge but be comprehensible to the younger members of the family. It is fine for teens to hear these old favorites again. Have your high schoolers listen with adult ears. (For instance, in one of our favorites, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne often makes asides to the adults who are reading the book. Children would never pick up on this but it is a blast for teens and adults.)
- Choose books whose tropes and philosophical concepts need to be revisited by your teens. The Chronicles of Narnia are perfect examples of this. Your high schoolers are metacognitive enough (remember your Human Development course?) to recognize the incredible amount of symbolism that C.S. Lewis embedded in the stories.
- Choose books whose moral and ethical themes should be discussed by family members of all ages. Books like God’s Smuggler or The Hiding Place inspire older elementary children through teens to think about what it means to risk one’s life for the Gospel. A Christmas Carol deals with greed and generosity. People of all ages benefit from reading the Bible aloud.
- Choose books that are just plain fun like Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats or any of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series.
Our local homeschool high schoolers add a few read-alouds to their book lists each year. Here are some favorites of the 7Sisters community. (You’ll notice that many of these books have study guides developed by 7Sisters. That is precisely because our homeschool high schoolers loved the books and needed them to be upgraded for high school credit.)
- The Bible
- Captains Courageous- Rudyard Kipling
- All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriott
- A Christmas Carol– Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia– C.S. Lewis
- God’s Smuggler– Brother Andrew
- The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom (Part of our Great Christian Writers series…a popular title in our EBookstore!
- The Hobbit– J.R.R. Tolkien
- Any Jeeves and Wooster book- P.G. Wodehouse
- The Little Princess- Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats– T.S. Eliot
- Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (Focus on the life-lessons to be learned from each stop along Pilgrim’s allegorical journey!)
- A Separate Peace– John Knowles (often overlooked…a tremendous coming of age story)
- Click here to view an excerpt from A Separate Peace Study Guide
- The Westing Game- Ellen Raskin (and many other Newbery Award Winners)
- Winnie the Pooh- A.A. Milne
- A Wrinkle in Time- Madeleine L’Engle
What are some favorites of your family?
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There is not much out there for great teen family read aloud for homeschool families. Can anyone remember if the James Herriot books are young teen friendly or The Chosen?
Herriot books are WONDERFUL read-alouds for teens and the whole family, JS. (Of course, you must have Kleenex on hand for some of the stories.) I (Vicki) haven’t read The Chosen. Will have to check it out. Do you have some suggestions for other read-alouds?
Audiobooks are such a great way to make the most out of a car ride! Sometimes you can all laugh together over a humorous story or enjoy a British reader make an old British classic come alive. I am a particular fan of listening to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien novels on audio!
Great list. We not only read aloud but listen to audiobooks together in the car and it’s not always easy to find something that interests all three of my boys.