The World In 80 Days Story For Kids

Reading Around the World in Eighty Days With Children

The original Jules Verne novel came out in 1873 and has been adapted into countless children's versions ever since. The basic plot follows Phileas Fogg, a wealthy British gentleman who makes a wager that he can circle the globe in exactly eighty days. He travels with his French valet Passepartout, crossing from England through India and the United States before returning to London. There are chase sequences, natural disasters, and a twist involving a mistaken identity that most kids find genuinely exciting. The challenge with this story is not the plot itself. It is the language. Verne wrote in dense, formal 19th-century French prose, and even the best abridged editions sometimes retain vocabulary and sentence structures that will lose a child under ten. I learned this the hard way when a parent handed me a widely sold children's edition and asked me why her nine-year-old was refusing to read past chapter three. The vocabulary was fine but the pacing was brutal. Verne devotes entire paragraphs to weather reports and train schedules. Kids do not care about steam engine specifications. You skip them.

The World In 80 Days Story For Kids

When selecting a version for a child, you are really choosing between two approaches: a faithful abridgment that preserves the original structure, and a complete rewrite that adapts the story into modern prose. The faithful versions are better for older readers around twelve and up who want the actual experience of the novel. The rewritten versions work much better for younger audiences because they compress events, remove digressions, and simplify dialogue without losing the core narrative. Here is something most parents and teachers miss when working with this material. The moral framework of the story is actually more complicated than it appears on the surface. Fogg is technically a colonizer figure. His bet assumes the world is a resource to be conquered and clock-worked. Passepartout's cultural misunderstandings are played for humor in most traditional adaptations. When you present this to children without context, they absorb the colonial framing as natural. The workaround I use is straightforward. Read the first two chapters together and pause to ask what the wager actually implies. A twelve-year-old will almost immediately notice that a man betting on whether he can outrun the Earth itself feels pretty arrogant. That conversation opens the door to discussing how adventure stories from that era shaped real-world attitudes about other countries and peoples. I also recommend pairing the reading with a physical map. Keep it open on the table. Every time the characters move to a new location, mark the route with a pencil line. This takes about ten minutes of setup and transforms the story from a sequence of random events into a tangible geography lesson. Children remember the Himalayas and the Atlantic crossing differently when they draw the lines themselves. It also makes the time pressure feel real instead of abstract. Fogg genuinely has less than eightieth of a year for each continent, and watching the pencil stretch across a real map changes how a child experiences the urgency.

One edge case that comes up frequently involves the steamship and railway schedules. Verne includes extremely specific timetables for most of the journey. In the original novel these serve a structural purpose. They make the reader anxious about whether Fogg can possibly make each connection. For a child, these sections read like spreadsheets. The solution is not to assign the whole book at once. Read in twenty-minute segments. Stop before the next schedule section begins. Return the next day and pick up at the actual action. This usually cuts total reading time from six hours down to about three, spread across a week or two, while maintaining comprehension and retention at a higher level. Where to find appropriate editions:

• Puffin Classics has a solid abridged version suitable for ages eight to twelve.
• Oxford Bookworms Library offers a graded reader at Level 4 that simplifies the prose significantly.
• The IllustratedClassics edition is good for visual learners and includes maps.
• LibriVox provides free public domain audiobook recordings if you want to listen rather than read.

There is a real downside to using abridged or rewritten editions. They strip away the cultural details that make the setting feel lived-in. Descriptions of Mumbai, Suez, and New York that appear in the full novel give children genuine exposure to 19th-century global trade routes and colonial infrastructure. The simplified versions turn these locations into generic backdrops. If cultural education is a priority, stick to the unabridged text and read aloud to them. You do the pacing work. They get the full picture. Another common mistake is assigning the book as a solo reading exercise to a child who reads below grade level. The book requires comfortable independent reading ability at roughly a fifth-grade level or higher. Below that, the experience becomes frustrating for everyone involved. I have watched children who could handle Treasure Island struggle completely with this because Verne's prose relies on long embedded clauses and passive constructions. In those cases, the audiobook paired with the physical book works far better. Listening reduces cognitive load while the child follows along visually. It is not cheating. It is scaffolding. The ending deserves a mention because almost every adapted children's version softens it. In the novel, Fogg arrives back in London thirty minutes ahead of schedule, only to realize he mistakenly crossed the International Date Line and gained an extra day. This reversal is the single most important thematic moment in the entire book. It demonstrates that the world does not operate on a single agreed-upon framework. Time zones exist precisely because human agreements about measurement are arbitrary and shifting. Some editors remove this detail because they consider it confusing. It is not confusing. It is the point. If an edition omits it, the story is fundamentally weakened and you should choose a different version.

For classroom use, I typically run this as a three-week unit with daily twenty-minute read-aloud sessions. Week one covers London through Suez. Week two covers India and the Pacific crossing. Week three covers America and the final return. Each session ends with a map check and one discussion question. The students who do the map work consistently score higher on comprehension quizzes. The discussion questions keep them engaged without turning the book into a lecture. Sample questions include figuring out why Fogg trusts the wrong person in India, calculating approximate travel times between major cities, and deciding whether the wager was worth making. The story remains relevant because it forces a discussion about speed, efficiency, and whether completing a task quickly is the same as understanding where you have been. That is a conversation worth having with children regardless of which edition you choose.