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I haven’t posted a book roundup post for a while, and I wanted to share some of the recent reads the children and I have been sharing. These are all beautiful books that inspire children to be kind and to nurture the world around them, and to recognise their own power. Books can do a great job of building empathy and supporting often tricky or difficult conversations and these books that I am sharing here and some of the best new books to support young children.
Kindness and Positivity
First up, is a book I shared to Instagram earlier in the week, Hello! A Counting Book of Kindness.
This is a gorgeous book that follows a family as they travel away from danger to a place of safety. It is a great introduction for even the youngest of children to the idea of refugees and inclusivity. It’s a beautifully hopeful book and demonstrates how simple acts of kindness can have profound impacts.
Next is Bloom, which is part of Tiny Owl’s Hope in a Scary World series. This again is lovely book all about a girl who sees a beautiful flower and talks to it each morning on her way to school. The owner of the flower, however, shouts at her. The man is angry and the flower doesn’t bloom any longer. He tries everything he can think of to encourage the flower to open once more, until he finally asks the girl. When the flower is talked to with love it once again blooms. I really like this book as it’s a great and subtle way to talk about the power of positive thinking with children, and show them that a change in mindset if often enough to get over a hurdle in life. This book is wonderfully and gently illustrated and does a superb job of demonstrating the simple power of positivity (and also that adults have much to learn from children).
Celebrating our Individuality
Only a Tree knows how to be a tree by Mary Murphy is a superb book and showing how we all have a place in the world. A place that only we can uniquely occupy. The book is effortlessly inclusive and shows how we all are individual but part of a bigger whole. We all a place in the world that only we can occupy.
One the theme of individuals, Everybody Counts is a fantastically clever book that starts at 0 and goes to 7.5 billion. There is SO much to explore in this book and it’s one we have returned to time and time again over the past few months. We follow a range of characters through the story, watching how they interact with others around them and how their paths can cross in the most mundane or unexpected ways. This is a superb book and the attention to detail is astounding. You can spot the characters throughout the story, deducing the relationships and stories behind each of the characters. Everyone is different and experiencing their own life, but ultimately everyone counts and our interactions, no matter how abstract can have ripples.
The Great Big Brain Book (part of the Great Big Series) is a fabulous introduction to our brains which are just incredible. This book talks about the senses and feelings, language and memory and how our mental health can affect the brain. I always find this series of books to be really great in having open-ended discussion points littered throughout, with enough hooks to get children thinking and talking about the issues it presents. The information is written and presented in a really fun and engaging way and it is a book to return to time and time again.
Appreciating Nature
And my final selection of books in this post are two that help children to appreciate nature. One World, Many Colours is a clever geography-based book which shows how we share the world and how many of the colours in nature can be found throughout the world, across different cities and cultures. It’s very cleverly done and the illustrations by Alette Straathof are beautiful and you can find yourself lost in them for a while as you pick out the details in each spread.
And, my final book is Mrs Noah’s Garden. Mrs Noah needs to build a garden from the bare land. With the help of children, she prepares the land, planets and waters and, in time, the garden blooms. There are other things growing too (hinted at subtly throughout the book but never explicitly mentioned). It is a great book to appreciate nature, and to be patient for nature is quietly working away to bring life. But it’s also a book about empathy, about settling in new lands and creating a new home for a family.
