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I have been searching in vain for decent spiritual reading for children about 8-10 years old.  There seems to be a huge void in this area.  There are great books out there, but most have vocabulary and syntax and grammar that are geared towards adults and which render them unintelligible for younger children.  That's even true of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible.  Sometimes the language is so archaic that it's inaccessible to children.  Same thing with most lives of the saints.  Ironically, if you look at the Greek New Testament, it's written in the simplest Greek and has very little complex grammar or syntax.

On the other hand you have a lot of the saint picture books, but they seem to be geared towards the 5- or 6-year old and are lacking in substance and have a lot of fluff.

So something in between these.

I've had a thought to come up with a children's translation of the Bible, based on the Douay Rheims (plus Greek and Latin) but simplified for children.  Same thing with lives of the saints.  But I just don't have the time at this point in my life.

Another thing I've also thought would be beneficial for children but I don't have the time to put together is little audios with guided meditations for children, to help teach them mental prayer.  Yes, the SSPX offers Ignatian retreats, but these target adults and late teens.  And chlldren need guided meditations.  These new-agers create guided meditations, but there's nothing like that out there for younger Catholic children.  Children need to learn mental prayer, and they need to be walked through it and guided through it, helping them to use their imagination, the imagination of their various senses, according to the method of St. Ignatius.  You can't just give them a "topic" for meditation, as one does for adults and send them off.

To me, this 8-10 year-old range is the most critical in spiritual formation, and yet it appears to be the most neglected.

Does anyone know of materials out there that target this range?  If not, I'm going to have to start creating such materials myself.

Two things here.  

First,
I recommend that YOU read from Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity (Ignatius Press) in the first 3 chapters.  Do not expect the 8-10 year olds to understand this.  It is for you, so you can help them.  You say they need guidance using their "imaginations" but I suspect you don't literally mean that.  

WARNING:  Pay no attention to the 8-page "Preface to the Revised Edition," which goes on for 8 pages of infection with the unclean spirit of Vatican II that had swept the world at that time. When the book was first written it had no such corrupted Preface in it.  The one-page Forward to the First Edition is okay.

Read Chapter 1 of Sheed's book, and you will have a better grasp of what I'm talking about.  The first section is "Religion and the Mind," which goes directly to the problem of us replacing our intellect with our "imagination," as you have done here, in your post above.  It is an innocent mistake, because of our culture, but you would no doubt be most appreciative of the expansion Sheed offers in this fine book of his.

Second,
I do hope you haven't been looking at "centering prayer" or "meditations in the manner of Merton" or things like that.  Steer clear of anything written after about 1947.  That is, until you know what you're looking for.  We have a tremendous wealth of information that was available prior to then.  

I recommend for the children to try using a 150 step meditation for the Mysteries of the Rosary.  They're in a book called "Let's Pray, Not Just Say, the Rosary," by Fr. Richard L. Rooney, SJ.  

I made a thread about them in November, found here.

The Rosary is Our Lady's gift to us to train us how to meditate in a Catholic manner.  Actually that is the only way to really meditate at all.  Any "eastern mysticism" or "NewAge" method is only a DISTRACTION from the true one.  

It is the OBJECTIVE of meditation to FILL our mind with God's grace, beauty and goodness, not to EMPTY it of everything, including God's grace, beauty and goodness!!  Children can never be too young to learn this lesson.

Go and see - go to any public place and find the children that are worst behaved, and find out if they're Catholic or pray the Rosary.  They will not be.  Then find the children who are well-behaved, and find out the same.  Many of them will be so.  This is very interesting to do.

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I recommend for the children to try using a 150 step meditation for the Mysteries of the Rosary.  They're in a book called "Let's Pray, Not Just Say, the Rosary," by Fr. Richard L. Rooney, SJ.  

Thank you for the reference.

Is this the one?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076481656X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=076481656X&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20

It seems the Luminous Mysteries have been added.

"The original classic edition of this bestselling pamphlet with the Luminous Mysteries of Pope John Paul II added in the same style as Father Rooney's original fifteen mysteries".

IMO, here's how I think the Rosary works.  Our Lady (God through Our Lady) designed it quite beautifully.  In addition to lower forms of cognition, those shared even with animals, human beings also have higher intellectual faculties.  Have you every found yourself driving home from somewhere and, when you get there, being unable to recollect specifically how you got there?  I have that happen if I'm preoccupied thinking of more important things.  Somehow your brain causes your body to make all the correct turns, merge onto the right highway, stop at stop lights as needed, etc. without your having to consciously think "Turn right here.", "Now go straight." etc.  I've found myself 10 minutes on the way to work before realizing that I wasn't trying to get to work but merely intended to run an errand.  Because my mind was elsewhere and focused on other things.

What the Rosary does is to keep the lower cognitive functions of the brain anchored in the Hail Mary.  Because it's so habitual and repetitive, you don't have to focus your higher faculties on making sure you say the correct words.  Consequently, this frees up the higher faculties to contemplate the mysteries of the Rosary.

Our Lady gave us the Rosary basically as training wheels for (at least acquired) contemplation.  Contemplation involves the almost exclusive use of higher faculties to think about God ... without the noise of recursive thought.  So the Rosary anchors down in the repetitive words the recursive part of the brain so that the non-recursive higher-faculties can soar to the heights of contemplation.

I can see Our Blessed Mother behind us as we ride our bikes, first having us put on the training wheels (the Holy Rosary), then holding the back of the bike (as we focus more on the mysteries), and then finally sending us coasting in the world of contemplation.