Did you know that Grimms’ Fairy Tales are public domain?  This means that anyone can use, remix, reprint, or download these texts without restriction.  You can download text , audio and even illustrations (isn’t this one of Little Red Riding Hood gorgeous?) of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and thousands of other books at Project Gutenberg.  If you wanted to, you could even reprint and sell the stories without paying royalties.

You can also find Hans Christian Andersen favorites like The Emperor’s New Clothes — Thumbelina — The Little Match Girl – and The Little Mermaid.

How about Mother Goose?

Or Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book?

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass?

Or perhaps your adventurous and would like to download the mysterious sounding “Pleasing Stories for Good Children with Pictures” by anonymous.

Now you may be saying, “Proper children’s books come from the store and have hard covers and colorful pictures.”  To that, I would insiste that children’s stories exist in the air. They come to life when they are told with enthusiasm.  When young minds become enchanted by the worlds the stories contain, it doesn’t matter if the words come from a printing press or your home office printer.

As for illustrations, you have a budding artist on your hands already!  Imagine how excited they would be to illustrate the story you read to them, and how much more engaged and invested in the story!  They will become collaborators rather than passive absorbers.  Their relationship with literature will be richer as they exercise their own imagination to create their imaginary scenes rather than relying on an “expert” illustrator.

Or your child could exercise their skills by coloring in Public Domain illustrations like these:

You and your child can customize your own book, make it longer, shorter, mix two stories together… You could even make it into a craft by creating your own cover and binding it. What a great gift for Grandma from the grandkids! By being creative, you can save money and teach your children a new way to interact with literature!  Happy Reading!

*UPDATE* Another “project” also offers digitized public domain children’s books: the Rosetta Project

Tags: Children's Books, customization, Improving Reading Skills, Lewis Carroll, Literacy, personalization, Storytime, writers block

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 am and is filed under Children's Books, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.