Avriano Book Club
(coming soon)
The Avriano Book Club is an annual membership subscription service offering high quality insights and recommendations into building your young children’s library - currently pertaining picture books in English.
Become a member if you want to
✓ Have a well researched children’s library for your young children
✓ Manage your time efficiently, especially for parents with a demanding schedule
✓ Include English in your child’s language development as a primary or secondary language
✓ Expose your children to many different subjects from sciences to the arts
✓ Develop the love of reading and learning from quality materials and sources
Your children will learn
✓ Skills such as friendship and honesty
✓ Sciences such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy
✓ Arts with music and artist books
✓ Geography, countries, and the world
✓ Nature and biology
✓ How things work (airplanes, vehicles)
✓ Valuable lessons from handpicked stories
What’s Included
Picture books theme in English
The annual membership fee is USD 120 and offers access to our book club recommendations currently pertaining to picture books in English. You can read our selection criteria, principles, and disclaimers to learn more about our thinking and methods.
Seasonal updates
We will be adding books for the holidays such as Christmas and Easter, but also for vacation, summer, and traveling. You will also receive bonus material with holiday traditions.
Book references
Our subscription service offers book reviews and recommendations based on our research and does not include access to books in physical or digital format.
Member benefits
Structured approach for a well- rounded library
We have established a structured approach on how we curate books for the book club. Starting from the foundation of selection criteria, principles and disclaimers we establish the research framework. The study analysis is then organized around thematics, with a range of ten to twenty options per theme, and also the top three for each category. Our approach ensures encompassing many subjects from sciences to arts, skills, and language, as well as popular children’s topics such as vehicles and animals. We moreover prepare seasonal themes to align reading with a holiday period such as summer holidays and Christmas.
Seamless lifestyle enhancement for families with demanding schedules
Our Book Club is for parents of young children with very demanding schedules who have high expectations and little time to devote to research themselves. We provide our research as a service you can subscribe to and access our principled research with delineated selection criteria and advice from subject matter experts. If you want access to high quality books with breadth of options for your children that you can read to them yourself, or have a grandparent, or caretaker read to them and help them learn, then the Avriano Book Club will help you invest in your children’s education and skills enhancement early on in their lives.
Thoughtful research-driven selection process
The Avriano Book Club is curated by Maria Ploumaki Bigler with advice from subject matter experts in specific categories, e.g. science. Each book is evaluated against the defined selection criteria and is selected for its overall positive contribution to young children’s education. Due to her education and experience, Maria can build a framework based on a specific strategy that makes this book club a customized research project providing advice to parents of young children who aim for high quality insights into the English picture books category.
Comprehensive introduction to knowledge from a young age at home and in travel
Curating our family library is a meaningful act, allocating time and resources in making choices that bring a well-rounded collection of carefully selected, scientifically accurate and well made books. We bring a research-driven, thoughtful approach in creating a comprehensive family library with subjects important for children’s development. Some of the areas we encompass are sciences (such as physics, biology), language (such as ABC, advanced vocabulary), life lessons (such as friendship, truth), skills (such as thinking, problem solving), and international development (such as geography, cultures). We don’t suggest anything which we ourselves would not have in our library.
The Avriano Book Club membership subscription service caters to parents who place their children's development as an absolute priority, aiming for the highest quality resources, with limited time to do the research themselves.
Why we created the Avriano Book Club
“When I was pregnant, I started looking at acquiring children’s books for the first time in my adult life, only to find myself adrift in a sea of options I did not know how to delineate. I am a person who loves reading and has an extensive library collection, hence finding myself in a starting position was unexpected. I started looking at reviews, lists with top children’s books, friends and family’s recommendations, and I soon realised that my personal viewpoints were very specific, as specific as my philosophy in raising my children.
I decided to research according to the criteria which were important to me for selecting children’s books, read both book reviews and the books, and delineate children’s library
thematic categories. It did not take long to realize that the research was taking a significant amount of my time and resources, yet I knew that the return on my investment was quintessential for my child’s development. With the Avriano Book Club I offer to you the insights I wish I had when I started, those which I gained by systematically researching children’s books in English for young children. I hope it can make selecting books for your family more efficient, happier, and that you spend valuable time reading quality books!”
- Maria Ploumaki Bigler
How it's structured
How it's structured
The Avriano Book Club is structured around themes ranging from STEM and the Natural World to Life Skills and How Things Work. The themes then cascade down to subcategories, such as friendship under Life Skills and Vehicles under How Things Work. We also include recommendations for specific subjects, such as proposing children’s books that help prepare for the top 10 skills for the future as per the World Economic Forum (analytical thinking and innovation, complex problem solving, etc.).
Below we present two examples with 3 recommendations each for a theme and a subcategory: (i) The first 3 are recommendations about friendship under Life Skills, (ii) The second 3 are recommendations about the category Vehicles and Things that Go.
We aim for recommendations that inspire, educate, and are joyful to read.
Our Top 3 recommendations in friendship
If you want to instill in your children the warm feeling of friendship and the importance of having good friends, these stories will demonstrate what a true gift good friends are: how their love and acceptance warms our heart, how their personalities and skills compliment ours, and how important loyalty and cooperation are.
Corduroy
A heartwarming book about a teddy bear missing a button on his coverall and how a little girl loves him just how he is. This book will become a classic that you will read again and again, and every time smile with the clumsy teddy bear and the young girl who takes such good care of her new friend.
The Wishing Star
Little grey mouse and little brown mouse, two different characters but best friends, embark on a journey together chasing after a falling star in the hope of making their wishes come true. After their adventure they realize that their wish has already been fulfilled, as their friendship is the most important gift they have.
One Special Day
This is a sweet story of a little hedgehog, his cousin, and their friends who go out for a day picking flowers. Follow the friends together as they collaborate to help each other in their countryside adventure.
Our Top 3 recommendations in vehicles
For young children who are fascinated with vehicles (cars, trains, airplanes), here are our top selections in the category, where children not only read about their favourite means of transportation but also build confidence, learn about friendship, and have fun with the family!
The Little Engine That Could
This is for us the best book in this category. A tender story of toys who are helped by a little train, making for the first time a journey she has never made before. This heartwarming story provides inspiration to go out and do things even when one is small or they’ve never tried something before. This is our top recommendation for this category.
Little Blue Truck
This is our second recommendation in this category. A little blue truck with a good heart and warm behavior who helps a much bigger vehicle than him and is helped by all his animal friends. A book with vehicles and animals that young children will love, also teaching us about the importance of friendship.
Mitchell’s License
Our third recommendation is this charming book about a boy who turns his father into his own personal car. Mitchell doesn’t like going to bed at the end of the day until his father tempts him with the prospect of driving there, at which point he becomes very enthusiastic. It takes some practice until he can control the “car” well, with some amusing mistakes along the way. A heartwarming story about the bond between a father and his son.