Recommended children's booklists sorted by age or topic

Topic: Seasonal Events

Starting School

Picturebook

A classic picture book by Janet and Alan Ahlberg, all about a class of children starting school. The story walks through the experiences of the first term of school for a group of children, exploring the different activities and equipment they come across. A gently positive story that also explains that starting school is about more than just the first day!

Story Path

Kate Baker & Madalena Matoso

Picturebook

Travel along the story path and discover an enchanted world where fairy princesses battle with monsters from the deep and vampire cats zoom through the galaxy on silver unicorns.

This innovative twist on the classic quest tale allows young readers to choose their own characters, settings and plots at every turn. With a simple, easy-to-follow structure and bold, quirky imagery by award-winning illustrator Madalena Matoso, this is an imaginative storytelling experience for children of all ages.

Who will you meet? Where will you go? What will you do next? It’s all up to you…

Lulu’s First Day

Anna McQuinn & Rosalind Beardshaw

Picturebook

Lulu is going to preschool for the first time. She has visited school before with Mummy, but this time she will go on her own.

She’s excited, but a bit nervous. She gets dressed, packs her bag and makes sure she has her cat Dinah with her. When Lulu gets to school, she quickly settles and makes a friend with Mummy watching close by. When Mummy leaves, Lulu is nervous, but soon finds her way forward on her new adventure.

We highly recommend this starting school book and the whole Lulu series, which gently reassures preschool children about all sorts of relatable scenarios from getting a pet and planting flowers to starting school and shows them how to tackle new challenges head-on.

When a Dragon Goes to School

Caryl Hart & Rosalind Beardshaw

Picturebook

A fun and gentle introduction to expectations about what to do when you go to school. When a dragon goes to school, will she stamp her feet, hide from the teacher or throw crayons around? Or will she choose to put her belongings on her peg, enjoy the toys and books and eat her lunch politely with her friends? A lovely exploration of how to enjoy the routines, relationships and responsibilities that come with being big enough for school.

Together We Can

Caryl Hart and Ali Pye

Picturebook

Together We Can is a celebration of all the different forms and types of friendship. Crammed with a huge diversity of characters (and animals!), with a wide range of interests, this joyful book looks at what a friend is, how to be a friend, how to make friends, and the value of being together. It offers gentle suggestions on combatting loneliness, taking turns, saying sorry and finding commonality with others. Every child will be able to find someone like them within the pages of this book.

Together We Can has been chosen by Save The Children for their #SaveWithStories appeal. You can listen to the book, read by actress Freya Allan, here.

Mini Monsters – Can I Play?

Caryl Hart & Tony Neal

Picturebook

Meet the Mini Monsters, four adorable characters who are learning valuable lessons about friendship and how to get along, in a pre-school setting. In this story, Sparkle is putting on a magic show with Arthur, but when Scout wants to join in, Sparkle is not happy. After some heartache, Sparkle soon learns that playing together is much more fun. Hooray!

Author Caryl says: “I am in love with the design of this book, the colour scheme, backgrounds and illustrative details are really, really clever and Tony Neal has done a great job of capturing the personalities of these loveable characters.”

The Dot

Peter H. Reynolds

Picturebook

The story of a little girl whose art teacher helps her to develop a ‘can do’ attitude. Vashti is sure that she can’t draw, but when the teacher puts Vashti’s simple dot picture on display, Vashti begins to think of what else she might be able to draw too if she is only willing to give it a try.

Beautiful Oops!

Barney Salzberg

Picturebook

We love this engaging picture book, filled with interactive pop-ups and flaps. The story is about the tapping into the potential of things that appear to be mistakes, showing how torn paper or spilt paint can be approached with a positive attitude when you know that mistakes can be transformed to become something beautiful. We highly recommend this book for all primary classrooms!

After the Fall

Dan Santat

Graphic novel

We’ve all heard about Humpty Dumpty’s catastrophic fall, but what about how he got back up again? In this humorous picture book, Humpty Dumpty recounts his brave and arduous journey back up to the top of the wall again. We like the way in which this cleverly illustrated story acknowledges that things go wrong sometimes but that it can be our individual response to such misfortunate that often harvests resilience and hatches us into something stronger than ever before.

Ruby’s Worry

Tom Percival

Picturebook

Ruby’s Worry is arguably the most accessible mental-health-themed picture book that my class has come across. Percival depicts a ‘worry’ with a yellow orb that appears next to Ruby one day and continues to grow when she ignores the shadow-like entity, simply hoping that the worry will disappear of its own accord. When she meets another child with their own ‘worry’ and asks them about their feelings, she realises how to rid herself of worries – she needs to talk about them. This book has sparked meaningful class discussions, supporting pupils to understand that ‘it’s okay to not be okay’.

This is one of the most important books to share with young people. It teaches them about sharing their troubles rather than letting them spiral out of control.

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