It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, we pick five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top picks for you to read in December 2022.
We love this full-throttle mystery adventure series set on trains, with likeable characters and well-paced plots. This latest instalment invites readers onboard a journey through the never-ending night of the arctic winter towards the Arctic Circle and Northern Lights. The clues and red herrings unfold one by one and the high spirit of adventure and atmospheric setting are enough to set imaginations tingling just as much as detective senses. An absolute winner of a story – just like the rest of the series.
Following the journey of Alex and his father across Europe as they attempt to escape a brutal government and seek refuge, Running Out of Time is a unique blend of science fiction and thriller, while also tackling some difficult real-life current events including refugee journeys across Europe.
The story is full of action and keeps the reader on the edge of their seat while showing just a fraction of the emotional toll those fleeing conflict face in their journey to safety. The author states in their afterword that the book is not an attempt to convey all the difficulties that refugees face, however, I believe that the book would be a great way to begin to open up conversations about this topic.
The narrative alternatives between different time perspectives, with each chapter having a title page identifying which time period it is set in.
A five-star read for Y6!
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, we pick five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top picks for you to read in December 2022.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, we pick five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top picks for you to read in November 2022.
We love to hear which books are most popular among our community of primary teachers, TAs, librarians, authors and children’s book lovers.
Our Review Panel searched for the top children’s books published in the last year. We looked for the best classroom read-alouds, the most popular books with children and the best books to support the school curriculum.
Browse the SHORTLISTED books in each category below – perfect for topping up your library with the best new children’s books from the past year!
Members of the BooksForTopics website were invited to vote for their favourites to find the winners of the Books of the Year 2024.
This is the first in a series of books that are real gems for children who are ready for a short chapter book but may still feel overwhelmed by too much text on a page.
Centred around an unlikely friendship between two animals, the stories are laugh-out-loud adventures with appealing illustrations that perfectly break up the text to suit the reading stamina of this age range.
This first adventure begins to focus on small-scale conflict resolution with the perfect dose of silliness (and toilet humour) to keep young readers entertained throughout.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, we pick five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top picks for you to read in October 2022.
Children’s films and books are full of nature’s duos: now it is time to learn about how pairs of animals and animal-plant combinations work together for mutual gain and survival in the real world.
Each double-page spread in this fascinating non-fiction book gives information about a different relationship. The reader learns how each member of the pair acts to benefit the other. For example: did you know that, in Columbia, there is a frog that babysits the eggs of a tarantula – stopping them from being eaten by ants – in return for being protected from predators such as snakes?
In addition to the main relationship, the reader is presented with plenty of interesting and delightful facts about each of the animals or plants themselves. Did you know that a skink lizard can make its tail fall off and grow again if it gets trapped? AND, sometimes, there is enough tail left over that the skink actually ends up with two tails!
The book covers a wide range of biomes and habitats: even the human scalp! All of the pages are beautifully illustrated to capture the reader’s imagination and make them want to discover more about the natural world. This book would be a welcome addition to any Key Stage Two non-fiction collection and could also be used as inspiration for fiction writing.
Justin’s own pirate themed series, Vampirates, was first published in 2005 and became instant international bestsellers. Now given a new drop of life by UCLan Publishing, with new content, artwork and a fresh sensitivity read, this white-knuckle series is brought to a new generation of young readers.
Vampirates starts with twins Grace and Connor who become separated at sea and are rescued by two very different ships. But where Connor finds himself in the hands of pirates eager to train a new recruit, Grace finds herself aboard a ship with a very unusual crew, who are waiting for the sun to set before deciding her fate…
Free and downloadable resources for schools are also available on the author’s website.
Yes, yes, Murder on the Orient Express is much more known and beloved. But although the train is famous, it spends most of the book stuck in a snowdrift, which I found very disappointing. This charming outing for Miss Marple starts when her friend sees a murder from one train while travelling in another. There’s very little blood or violence in this book, but all the excellent plotting you’d expect from Christie is here, twisting a railway murder into a classic country house mystery, with two boys on their school holiday helping hunt for clues. A good introduction to the queen of crime for a young reader.
review
Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Would you recommend the book for use in primary schools?
yes
Curriculum links (if relevant)
Curriculum links (if relevant)
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