I love books, and I especially love free books! So I’m a frequent user of Project Gutenberg, which distributes free eBook versions of books in the public domain.

Raise The Bar Parents has unique, Common Core-aligned math and reading quizzes for kids in grades 2-8, which can help parents understand how their kids are doing relative to the new, higher expectations the standards represent. We also offer follow-ups to those quizzes, including suggested books for kids to read at each grade level.

Coming very soon (look for a future post!), we’ll also have parent guides to aid in discussions with kids about those books. Those guides will have great questions, specific to each book on our follow-ups list, and we’ll also have a standard set of questions that work for any book. So whatever your child is reading, you’ll have a guide to having fun, productive conversations directed toward making sure their reading skills meet and exceed grade-level expectations.

While working on getting this new material online, I realized that there is no convenient online list of free books for kids, organized by grade level. So I thought I’d share this list of free children’s books that I came across as part of this work.

[Links go to the author page on gutenberg.org; the book page on gutenberg.org; and the source of the grade level recommendation.]

Reading levels for these books are inexact. So don’t be alarmed if your child has trouble reading one that’s supposed to be on grade level. And of course it’s OK for them to read harder books, too! One rule of thumb (pun intended) is the “five-finger test”: have your child read about a page of a book, and raise a finger for each word that he or she can’t read, or doesn’t understand. If you get to all five fingers, the book is probably too much.