6 Time-Traveling Chapter Books for Kids Who Love Magic Tree House
by Denise Schipani
For a relatively brief, intensive period, my now 11-year-old was obsessed with Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series. He plowed through book after book, sometimes finishing one before we got home from the library. He couldn’t get enough of the time-traveling adventures of siblings Jack and Annie until, finally, he caught up with Osborne’s output at about book 50 (there are now even more installments in the series, the newest being the upcoming Hurricane Heroes in Texas, plus a series of nonfiction companion books called Fact Trackers).
It’s clear why Magic Tree House is popular for kids new to chapter books. The series combines a soothing familiarity (same characters, same structure, some of the same phrasing in places) with the thrilling draw of time travel. What kid wouldn’t love to zip back and forth through time, especially if their adventures could, like Jack and Annie’s, always end safely back home? For young readers who’ve soared through the entire Magic Tree House series like my son, here are a handful of chapter books and series that offer a fun-filled time-traveling escape:
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Secret Smithsonian Adventures Series
Available from:The Wrong Wrights, published by the Smithsonian Institute, will appeal to graphic novel devotees. In this first installment of the Secret Smithsonian Adventures series, kids in a museum (we said Smithsonian, right?!) take a trip back in time to help Orville and Wilbur Wright regain their proper place in history. Oh, and they learn quite a bit about aerodynamics and aviation in the process.
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The Left Behinds Series
Save the Union during the Civil War — and be home by dinner? No problem, at least not for the kids in Abe Lincoln and the Selfie that Saved the Union, the second book in The Left Behinds series. With the iTime app on their phone (don’t check the App store, kids, because iTime isn’t real ... yet), the children end up in Lincoln’s White House in 1863, on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg. They must travel to the battle site and, you know, save history. In another Left Behinds book, the kids head back to 1776 to lend a hand to George Washington.
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The Treasure Chest Series
This ten-book series follows twins Maisie and Felix, who move into the Elm Medona, their aunt’s old mansion in Rhode Island. There they discover a magical room that has the power to transport them to the past to meet influential people, like Clara Barton, Crazy Horse, and Alexander Hamilton, when they were young adults. In each installment, they must solve a mystery in order to return home.
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Flashback Four Series
Your smart kid may already know that photography existed during the Civil War. So why aren’t there pictures of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address? Because it was so short; photographers had no time to set up their cumbersome equipment! Popular and prolific author Dan Gutman has sent four kids back to the scene in Flashback Four: The Lincoln Project, the first book in the series. With the help of a magic smartboard invented by the millionaire Mrs. Z, this group of very different kids grabs digital cameras and goes back in time to get the best picture ever. Surely, it can’t be that easy, or can it?
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The Thrifty Guides Series
Tweens can take a virtual vacation through time and space with this series of “travel guides” by Jonathan W. Stokes. With fun illustrations and humor-filled text, these guides imagine what it would be like to travel around ancient Rome or drop in on American Revolution. In the newest installment, kids will be able to explore ancient Greece.
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The Time Garden
At the Massachusetts home of a distant relative, a set of siblings find a thyme garden (get the pun there?) and are able to travel, with the help of a mysterious resident of the garden called Natterjack, both back in time (in American history) and in space (to England, where their parents currently are). Edward Eager’s The Time Garden is part of a series; the kids, Ann, Roger, Eliza and Jack will be familiar to readers of Knight’s Castle.
Do you have any other time-traveling chapter book recommendations for tweens? Let us know in the comments section below!