I have written lots and I do mean LOTS of posts about the books that we used in our primary (KS2) home education. But no matter how many posts I may have written everyone is always interested in more recommendations and I totally get that because books were a huge part of how we educated. So after some questions about the type of books that my kids enjoyed here is a post on what book categories were big hits when the kids were younger (But first I want to clarify something – all kids are different. The age that the start reading, the level that they read at, which books they find fascinating and even how often the read. It is always going to be unique to your kiddo. This is what we liked and what we found useful.)

Okay so for primary ages I found 3 types of books that worked for my kids – animal books, historical fiction stories and humorous stories. Those three categories were real winners for us.

Books on animals are a great starting point. Both my kids were naturally interested in learning about animals so we always knew animal books would be a winner. But if your kiddo is not as interested I would like to suggest something that combines learning about animals with a cute story. We found a series of books called Animal Diaries did this, and I have to say these books were read cover to cover and they inspired my kids to create their own animal diaries (where they pretended to be animals writing in their own diaries).

And my kids actually enjoyed non-fiction animal books too. In fact non-fiction animal books were very popular in our house, and in all honesty a LOT of our KS2 Science revolved around animals (animal adaptations, their homes, even things like animal skeletons. We loved animal science in our house and I must confess we ended up with a large number of animal books but two that stand out for me are – our Life Cycle book and this animal knowledge encyclopedia. .

Historical Fiction always ticked a lot of boxes for us. We found the stories fascinating and they would often lead to interesting discussing about life “way back when”. We really did read a lot of historical fiction in their primary years. Ours tended to focus on the Anglo-Saxon / Viking period, although we also found some good Victorian England and World War stories that suited the primary ages, but I always like to link our historical fiction to the History that we are covering so we really did loose ourselves in Old England.

And speaking of History – the Horrible History series is brilliant. It had my son laughing out loud and reading me the most disgusting bits that he could find. He really enjoyed the series.

And the third category was humor. With my son I quickly discovered that if he thought a book was funny he would read it and not put it down. He loved the Bee Boy series and of course the brilliant How to Train your Dragon series – ahh we spent ages reading this series together and we would ended up laughing out loud at some of the antics.

Okay I really should include a fourth category – Dinosaur books. Although I realize dinosaurs are not everyones cup of tea my son was (still is) obsessed with them so I did use the dinosaur theme to get him to read quite a lot when he was in his primary years.

We have always had a book-based home education style. When the kids were younger we would often use a good book as a spring board for learning. I tried to expose the kids to a wide range of different books, some were massive hits and some were ignored but I did always find that if it was an animal based story, a interesting historical fiction or a laugh out loud funny book my kids would read it cover to cover and they would read it multiple times.