A girl saves a runt pig from being killed. A spider in the barn doorway then spends the rest of her life saving him again, by writing words in her web that convince a town the pig is remarkable. It came out in 1952 and it has never gone out of print.
Why it earns read-aloud time
Because of how the sentences sound in your mouth.
E. B. White wrote the book on writing well, literally, and then he wrote this. Read the first line out loud. Read the paragraph about the barn, the one that lists what it smelled like. Those are not decorated sentences, they are plain ones, arranged by somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. A child hearing that is getting an ear for good prose without a single worksheet.
And then there is the thing nobody tells you about reading it aloud. Somewhere near the end your voice is going to go. You will try to keep reading and you will not entirely manage it. Your child will look up at you.
That moment is worth more than the book. A kid who watches a parent get undone by a paragraph has just learned that words can do that, and they will never quite unlearn it.
The child it lands with
Every child, honestly, which is not a thing I say about the rest of this list.
But it lands hardest on two. The one who thinks books are boring, because the barn is funny for a long while before it is sad, and Templeton is genuinely disgusting in a way eight-year-olds find hilarious. And the one who is already tender about animals, who will carry Charlotte around for a month.
One place to stop and talk
When Charlotte first agrees to help, Wilbur asks why she would do that for him, and she does not give him a clean answer.
Stop there and ask your child the same question. Why does she help? She gets nothing. She is not related to him. The answer your child gives you at eight is worth writing down somewhere, because it is usually better than the one an adult gives.
What to know going in
Charlotte dies. It is not a surprise ending, it is the point of the book, and it is written gently and without flinching.
If your child is currently working through a real loss, a grandparent or a pet, know that this is coming and decide on purpose whether this is the right month for it. It is not a reason to skip the book. Plenty of families read it precisely because it gives a child a safe place to feel that. But walk in knowing, rather than getting ambushed on a Tuesday night.
The other honest note is smaller: the pace is slow by modern standards. The middle of the book is barn life and weather and not much plot. That is a feature when you are reading it aloud, and it can be a slog if a child is reading it alone.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at Charlotte's Web, alongside nine others on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
If your child liked this one
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Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child.
