By Aesop
The whole treasury of Aesop's fables in short, clear tellings, a page or two each, with a plain little lesson at the end you can talk about together.
This is the collection most of us picture when we think of Aesop: dozens of the old fables, the tortoise and the hare, the ant and the grasshopper, the boy who cried wolf, the fox who couldn't reach the grapes, each told in a page or two of plain, easy words and finished off with its little moral. Milo Winter's warm color pictures sit right alongside, so there's something to look at for every story. Because each fable is so short and so complete, you can read one and stop, or read six, and every single one has a point tucked in the end that a child can turn over and put in their own words.
Fables are made for narration and notebooking, and this is why they sit at the front of the shelf. Each one is short enough that a young child can hold the whole story in their head and tell it back without getting lost, which is exactly the skill you're building. The moral gives them something to think about and draw, and because the tales are so old and so widely known, your child meets phrases they'll hear for the rest of their life, sour grapes, crying wolf, slow and steady.