Ah, good thread! A few chapter books that my DS5 enjoys and has for a while:
- Horrid Henry series (Francesca Simon)
- Worst Witch series (Jill Murphy): this is clearly for girls but he didn't mind, probably as the covers aren't pink :-)
- Flat Stanley
We find that fiction is not where DS gets his reading challenges, though: any fiction that's interesting and not too scary for him is easy for him to read. His challenges come from non-fiction reading, mostly science books/magazines/websites, some aimed at adults.
But also, the great thing about the library is that it's fine to get things without knowing whether they'll be hits or not, so I recommend encouraging him to pick things up and not putting him off if they're apparently inappropriate. We've had some surprising successes.
The most surprising perhaps was not from the library: I was reading Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation - which is fantastic, btw. DS asked what it was, and on hearing that it was a story involving monsters and a dragon, wanted to hear some. We ended up reading the whole thing aloud to him, to his great delight (and ours: reading it aloud definitely adds something). Apparently scary things aren't scary if they're in poetry, or something.
