Best Children’s Books About Design Technology (DT) and Engineering
Inspire young readers to innovate and create with this list of the best children’s books about STEM, Design Technology and Engineering.
Curious minds will find answers to questions like What’s Technology?, How Was That Built? and How Do Bridges Work? among the featured titles, which explore the big ideas behind everything from a spacesuit to a racing car.
Best Children’s Books About Art and Artists
From The First Drawing to A World of Art, creativity and colour burst out of this list of the best children’s books about art and artists!
Younger children will delight in vibrant picturebooks like Luna Loves Art and Beautiful Oops!, while intrigue and adventure await older readers in Portraits and Poison and How to Steal the Mona Lisa. For fact-lovers there are fascinating life stories of artists such as Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo.
Best Children’s Books About Horses and Ponies
This list of the best children’s books about horses and ponies offers something for everyone – whether they read at a trot or a gallop!
This horses and ponies booklist showcases a range of richly illustrated picturebooks alongside fact-packed non-fiction titles.
Both shorter and longer chapter books are also included, featuring tales of adventure, courage, magic and mystery to delight young readers of all ages and abilities.
From ballet to ballroom and disco to street dance, this list showcases the best children’s books about dance and ballet.
Vibrant and engaging picturebooks will have younger readers dancing along to tales of movement and rhythm, while non-fiction fans will delight at stories of real-life dancers.
This dance and ballet booklist also includes a wealth of dance-themed chapter books which tackle topics like friendship, teamwork and courage alongside rehearsals, costumes and talent shows.
Throw in some aliens, witches and dancing fruit, and you’ve got the best list of children’s books about dance!
Newly Updated – April 2024
We’ve hand-picked a list of 30 recommended books for Junior School children. Update your Key Stage 2 classroom library or home book collections with our list of the best books for children aged 7-11, featuring disappearing grown-ups, a robot best friend, a hero on an elephant and a football-loving dog!
This KS2 booklist includes books to read with children alongside books for them to read themselves. Featuring popular storytime reads like The Wonder Brothers, laugh-out-loud choices like Trixie Pickle, thrilling adventure stories like The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts and fact-filled favourites like Football Rules, this junior school reading list has something for everyone.
This Key Stage 2 book list has been put together based on a mix of titles taken from our popular individual year group reading lists and with the help of the librarians and booksellers at Peters. The emphasis is on introducing newer books that school libraries may not already have, to help pupils discover brand-new favourites to read for pleasure.
There is also a downloadable checklist and a printable poster, and schools can purchase full packs of these books from Peters or select packs of the Primary books or KS1 books instead.
If you want more specific recommendations, you may like our Year Group Lists (see below) or Curriculum Topic Booklists.
Browse the junior school reading list below or scroll down to find more purchasing options and printable resources.
Newly Updated – April 2024
We’ve hand-picked a list of 20 recommended books for Infant School children. Update your Key Stage 1 class library or home book collections with our list of the best books for KS1 children, featuring everything from fashion-conscious flamingoes to pesky pirates to sizzling sausages.
Featuring popular KS1 storytime reads like Magic Faces, laugh-out-loud choices like Pop!, well-loved picturebooks like Coming to England and top-notch non-fiction like Little Brown Nut, this list has something for everyone.
This infant book list has been put together based on a mix of titles taken from our popular individual year group reading lists and with the help of the librarians and booksellers at Peters. The emphasis is on introducing newer books that school libraries may not already have, to help pupils discover brand-new favourites to read for pleasure.
There is also a downloadable checklist and a printable poster, and schools can purchase full packs of these books from Peters or select packs of the Primary books or KS2 books instead.
If you are looking for more specific recommendations, you may like our Year Group Lists (see below) or Curriculum Topic Booklists.
Browse the infant school reading list below or scroll down to find more purchasing options and printable resources.
Newly Updated – April 2024
Browse our reading list of 50 recommended books for Primary Schools. Update your class library or home book collections with our list of the best Primary School books, featuring everything from intergalactic snail adventures and unexpected unicorns to secret agent chameleons and mountain explorers.
This primary reading list includes books to read with children alongside books for them to read themselves. Featuring popular storytime reads like Gigantic and Pop!, early chapter books like Magic Faces, action-packed adventure books like The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts and top-notch non-fiction like How Do Meerkats Order Pizza?, this list really does have something for everyone.
This list has been put together based on a mix of titles taken from our popular individual year group reading lists and with the help of the team of librarians and booksellers at Peters.
If you’re a parent or teacher looking for the best books for Primary School children, look no further than our list. Whether you are looking for funny read-alouds, new releases or educational reads, we have something to suit every young reader’s interests. Our Primary School booklist includes both fiction and non-fiction recommendations to offer primary school children a deliciously tempting offering of reading-for-pleasure choices.
There is also a downloadable checklist and a printable poster, and schools can purchase full packs of these books from Peters or select packs of the KS2 books or KS1 books from the list.
If you are looking for more specific recommendations, you may like our Year Group Lists (see below) or Curriculum Topic Booklists.
Browse the primary school reading list below or scroll down to find more purchasing options and printable resources.
We’re so excited to see the launch of these brand new awards by the charity Inclusive Books for Children. Recognising the best new inclusive books, these awards fit into Inclusive Books for Children’s wider aim to make mainstream books inclusive, and to bring inclusive books into the mainstream. We’re thrilled to see some of our favourite titles, authors and characters among the 13 shortlisted books.
Three books are shortlisted in the Baby and Toddler Books category: Too Green!, Zeki Goes to the Park and Zeki Hikes with Daddy. Zeki is a popular character among younger readers and we’re delighted to see him return.
The Picture Books for ages 3–7 category shortlist includes Dadaji’s Paintbrush and Faruq and the Wiri Wiri, which both feature on our Recommended Reads lists. The other titles shortlisted in this category are The Missing Piece, To the Other Side and You’re So Amazing!.
A host of our favourite characters feature in the Children’s Fiction for ages 5-9 category shortlist, and we’re excited by the return of Lizzie and Lucky in The Mystery of the Lost Chicken, Sona Sharma in Wish Me Luck, and Too Small Tola in Too Small Tola Makes It Count. Budgie and Meet the Maliks, Twin Detectives: The Cookie Culprit make up the rest of this category shortlist.
The judging panel boasts educators, authors, broadcasters, illustrators and advocates, and the awards ceremony will take place in London on the 28th of February.
Judged entirely by teachers, the UKLA Book Awards are a celebration of children’s books which seeks to encourage teachers to increase their knowledge of newly published, high quality children’s books, and to promote the place of books in educational settings at all levels.
A total of 87 teachers were involved in shortlisting for the 2023 awards, and here at BooksForTopics HQ, we were delighted to see so many of our favourite titles and authors featured among the shortlists for these awards.
The Age 3-6 list features Who Are You? and The Comet, which both appear on our Recommended Reads lists, and we were excited to see Malorie Blackman – whose titles more usually feature in our lists for older children – represented in this list too, with We’re Going to Find the Monster! The winner of the Age 3-6 category, Flooded, was previously one of our Books of the Month picks, along with The Lion Above the Door and The Chime Seekers which both appear in the Age 7-10 shortlist. The Light in Everything was the winner in the Age 7-10 category.
More of our Recommended Reads and Books of the Month picks are to be found in the Information Books shortlist, including Amazon River, Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue and I am the Subway.
12 of the shortlisting panel went on to form the final judging panel, and the winners were announced on 23rd June at the UKLA International Conference at the University of Exeter.
Although the UKLA Book Awards celebrate books for children from nursery up to KS4, here we focus on the titles suited to readers of primary school age. The full shortlists, including the titles for older readers, can be found here.
This hand-picked list is a treasury of timeless stories passed down through generations, alongside more modern tales inspired by traditional stories and twisted fairy tales designed to entertain and amuse.
Many old favourites feature on this list, and young readers will love plotting their escape with Rapunzel, building a house with The Three Little Pigs or going to the ball with Cinderella. We’ve also picked some traditional tales from around the world, including BooksForTopics favourite Pattan’s Pumpkin, which is also one of our Recommended Reads for EYFS.
Alongside the traditional, this booklist features a number of fractured fairy tales that turn traditional stories on their head! There are hilarious twists on familiar stories, like Goldilocks and the Three Crocodiles and Cindergorilla, as well as tales told from new perspectives, like The Troll, The Pea and the Princess, and The Wolf’s Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood.
For timeless tales and riotous retellings, look no further than our list of the best fairy tales and traditional stories for children!
© BooksForTopics 2015-2024
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