Besides getting the nursery ready, one of the other pregnancy activities I enjoyed was starting to build Charlie’s library! I love children’s literature—so much so that I have a degree in writing it! As a result, I’ve taken on this task as seriously as if I’ve been asked to take over the Library of Congress.
I decided to write down my process and priorities, as well as leaving a few book recommendations at the end of the post! Hopefully this will help you build an amazing library for your Little One too, or just inspire you to pick up a picture book or two!
Storage & Display
One of my first library building priorities was actually finding a place for the books. This obviously includes bookshelves, but just as importantly—if not more importantly—a place to display and highlight certain books.
Until babies can no longer be considered babies, books’ primary attractions are their illustrations. But picture books are thin, and when they’re crammed on a bookshelf, there’s little that draws your eye to any of them, especially when you can’t read the title on the spine!
This is why I think picture book shelves are an essential piece of a baby’s library. There are a couple of options for picture book shelves: floating ledges and specific picture book bookcases.
I already had plans for a larger bookcase in my nursery, and didn’t want to take up more valuable floorspace, so I opted for floating shelves. Mine are hung up with command strips, so I didn’t even have to nail into the wall to install them.
Picture book shelves allow space for children to see the illustrations on whatever books you’re choosing to highlight at the moment, which will hopefully help the books grab your baby’s interest and make them easier to pick out for story time.
There are also tons of ideas for displays based around themes, like holidays, seasons, and events (like first days of school)! I plan on decorating and changing out my shelves based on the time of year, as someone who still loves to base my reading list on whatever season (of the year or of life) I’m currently celebrating.
Of course, even with picture book shelves, you’ll still want a place to store the books that aren’t currently being displayed. A popular item in a very small child’s nursery is cube storage, because they tend to be low to the ground and can be used for both toys and books.
Three-shelf bookcases are also a great option for children’s rooms—so long as they’re deep enough for picture books, which can be much wider than adult books!—as they’re a good height for children but also provide a lot of storage space.
Currently, I’m using a 4-cube organizer as well as a tall bookcase that we already owned (because I already have a large collection of children’s books and we’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to reorganize the rest of the books in our house). If you’re using a tall bookcase too, just remember to put books for a child’s current age and interest where they can easily reach them, so they can explore their library without your help—or climbing!
Collecting Books
Now that we’ve figured out where our books are going to go, it’s time to discuss what type of books we’re going to fill those places with. While I firmly believe anyone can enjoy any book, when building a library for a little one, picking a book for “the right age” takes more than just considering their reading comprehension level into account.
An Important Note
While talking about books to collect for little ones, I think one very important thing to note at the beginning, is that the people reading the books to the little ones need to also enjoy the books! If you hate Dr. Seuss—even if his books are cherished classic—don’t add those books to the library!
Adding books that will be a chore to read to you will make reading feel like a chore to a child too, and one of the most important tasks at this age is teaching children that books are fun and enjoyable—which is easiest done when you are having fun and enjoying the book yourself.
Sure, you may not like any book after reading it by request for the hundredth night in a row, but at least make sure you’ll like those first ten nights.
Board Books (Years 0-3)
Board books are books that are made from thick board instead of paper. They also tend to be smaller than picture books and adult books. These features make them small enough for a baby to hold and durable enough to withstand a baby’s less-than-delicate treatment of them.
1. I Like You More Than Ice Cream, 2. Goodnight Moon, 3. Where’s the Polar Bear, 4. Pat the Bunny, 5. Never Touch a Crocodile, and 6. C is for Camping
SENSORY BOOKS
The very first sense you’ll want to consider is an obvious one—sight! You can start reading to a baby as early as you’d like, and when they’re only a month or two old, colorful, high-contrast books will capture their attention.
Once a baby reaches three or four months, however, they’ll start reaching out to touch the pages. This is a great time to introduce a little one to “touch and feel” books. These are books with panels that include different textures, like velvet and rubber, usually related to the image on the page. Touch and feel books enrich the experience by engaging multiple senses at once, which not only makes reading a more fun activity, but helps develop a little one’s vocabulary and understanding of the words on the page. Other interactive sensory books can include scratch and sniff books, fabric books, lift-a-flap books, and finger puppet books; these are all great options for introducing a baby to a love of books and engaging them in reading.
1. The Pout-Pout Fish, 2. Llama Llama Red Pajama, 3. You’re My Little Cuddle Bug, 4. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, 5. Grab Your Pillow Armadillo, 6. The Going to Bed Book
AUDITORY EXPERIENCES
Another category of board books that help engage your baby in reading early on, are books that sound fun to listen to! This is a pretty broad category that includes books that focus on onomatopoeias, rhyming and repetition, and songs. These kinds of books help make the experience of being read to more engaging, and also help take the experience beyond pictures and vocabulary. Before understanding what any word means, a baby can still enjoy how they sound.
1. Z is for Zoo, 2. Anne of Green Gables: A Places Primer, 3. Touch! My Big Touch-And-Feel Word Book, 4. Paris: A Book of Shapes, 5. Duck and Goose: Colors!, 6. A is for Apple
VOCABULARY BUILDERS
Babies are learning machines, and their language development begins long before they can speak themselves. Early on, board books can help them build their vocabulary and word association: ABCs, counting, colors, animals, feelings, nature, food, shapes, etc. There are so many options out there for books like these, but I personally love the BabyLit “Primers” and the Hello, World travel series, because they’re a way to share my interests (literature and travel) with my little one while introducing them to basic words and concepts.
1. The Story of Ferdinand, 2. The Very Hungry Catepillar, 3. The Monster at the End of This Book, 4. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Bedtime Classics), 5. The Gruffalo, 6. Madeline
SIMPLE STORIES
Rounding out a board book collection are some of a little one’s very first “story” books—short picture books mainly in board book format so they can be one of the first stories a little one can hold in their hands, enjoy, and somehow cover in an unknown sticky substance. Juice? Apple sauce? Candy? They’ll never tell. The only priority in collecting these—prior to the little one expressing their own preferences—is picking out personal favorites that you can’t wait to share. Some of the picture books you read as a little one yourself may now come in a board book format.
Picture Books (Ages 3-6)
The problem with picture books is that there are so many and that too many are exceptionally great. Just to clarify, if it’s been awhile for any of you and “children’s book categories” isn’t your Jeopardy specialty. Picture books are thin, large books with illustrations on most pages. They tend to use the illustration and words in combination to tell a story and are often designed to be read aloud to a child who can’t yet read themselves and include language and stories a little more complicated than “early reader” or “I can read!” books. Of course, while picture books are usually targeted to children ages 3-6, they can be enjoyed by children of any age.
1. Green Eggs and Ham, 2. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, 3. Just For You, 4. Where the Wild Things Are, 5. Eloise, 6. The Tale of Peter Rabbit
BELOVED CLASSICS
The easiest place to start with a picture book collection is with beloved picture books from your own childhood, so that’s where I started with mine—books like Where the Wild Things Are, Dr. Seuss, The Berenstain Bears, Madeline, The Stinky Cheese Man... If you can’t quite recall what picture books you read as a little one, there’s list after list online to help jog your memory.
There are so many classic picture books, it’d be difficult to collect them all, so I’d recommend focusing on the ones you remember loving and would like to read again.
If you want to skip on a BIG classic—like if you hate Dr. Seuss—it might make you feel better to remember that you won’t be the only person exposing your little one to picture books, and there are ample opportunities for them to listen to, read, and enjoy those books with grandparents, babysitters, or at school or daycare. Eventually, you may have to add it to your home library as a result, but you don’t have to include it before your little one deems it necessary.
1. What’s Inside a Flower?, 2. A Ticket Around the World, 3. Claude Monet: He Saw the World in Brilliant Light, 4. The Story Orchestra: I Can Play, 5. National Parks of the U.S.A., 6. If You Had Your Birthday Party on the Moon
BOOKS TO SHARE INTERESTS & PASSIONS
My husband has played music his entire life. Our small home has a keyboard, piano, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, and a ukulele. It’s one of his greatest passions and something he’s interested in sharing with our children.
As a result, while starting to build up our picture book collection, I made it a point to look into books about music. I found picture book biographies of musicians, picture books that introduced different musical genres (that play music!), picture books that illustrated songs, picture book introductions to orchestras, picture book retellings of operas and ballets (that play music!), and picture books about children discovering their love of music.
Obviously, the largest musical picture book collection in the world won’t guarantee that our child will develop a love of music or ever want to touch an instrument, but they are a great tool for my husband to use to share his passion for music with our children, and allow them to explore that interest for themselves. Maybe our child will never play the piano, but they may discover a love of Swan Lake after reading about it in a picture book or decide they want to experiment with makeup like Ziggy Stardust. As a parent, you can’t know or control what a child will be interested in, but you can do your best to expose them to your interests and expand their world.
1. Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, 2. Charlie & Mouse, 3. Watercress, 4. Leaf by Sandra Dieckmann, 5. I Want My Hat Back, 6. The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend
RECENT AWARD WINNERS
Amazing new picture books are being released constantly. A great way to get a pulse on the industry and make sure your home library isn’t missing out on some truly stellar works is to look through lists of award honorees and winners. One of the biggest awards for picture books is the Caldecott Medal, offered to the year’s “most distinguished American picture book for children.” You can browse through honorees and winners here. A few other good ones are the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award, the Kids’ Book Choice Awards, the World Illustration Awards, the Cybils Award, and the Theodor Seuss Geisel awards. Barnes & Noble has a great page for browsing the winners and finalists of a number of different awards. Full disclosure, I bought Knight Owl while writing this post after seeing it on one of the lists. It was too cute!
1. Happy Valentine’s Day Curious George, 2. The Little Rabbit, 3. Back to School Rules, 4. Sweep, 5. Arthur’s Halloween. 6. Pick a Pine Tree
SEASONAL & EVENT STORIES
As adults, I believe we use books more for exploring beyond the limits of our own lived experienced—romances and careers to daydream about, mysteries and murders we hope never to personally witness, time periods we’ve only learned the barest histories of, places we haven’t discovered for ourselves. Books often serve an entirely different purpose for children, however, especially the littlest ones; they’re one of children’s best tools for understanding the world around them, their place in it, and ways to think and feel about the situations they find themselves in. Fantastical as they might be, most picture books are grounded in experiences, themes, and lessons that children can directly connect to their own lives.
In your library, it’s important to highlight some of the big changes and events happening in a child’s life—whether it be a change in season, a big holiday, or something more personal to a child like the arrival of a new sibling, potty training, losing their first tooth, or starting school for the first time. Books can answer all sorts of questions about the seasons of life and the seasons of a child’s life: what are some of the big changes in a child’s world during X? What are things we can appreciate and enjoy about X? What might be some things that may scare, worry or disappoint us about X? What are some of the things we can do to prepare ourselves for X? What are some of the activities and traditions we can participate in during X? What are some lessons we can learn from the events of X?
Having a small collection of books for each of these occasions will help answer these questions for a child, and hopefully help them develop their understanding to the point that they can approach them with confidence and joy.
1. Same, Same But Different, 2. What Makes a Family. 3. Pink is for Boys, 4. Last Stop on Market Street, 5. Julian is a Mermaid, 6. All Are Welcome
DIVERSE STORIES
Books are a key way we gain empathy. By existing in another point of view for a few pages, or a few hundred pages, we’re able to understand a vaster array of life experiences than we’ll ever be able to live for ourselves. I believe it’s important to give a child those opportunities to help them grow into a kinder, more openminded adult—to encounter the stories, experiences, and perspectives of others at an early age. I think it’s also important to make sure my little one knows that there is no one right way to “be,” and let him be comfortable in exploring his own identity. Books about gender, race, culture, orientation are all vital to rounding out a library.
1. Bedtime Stories: A Timeless Collection of Stories and Rhymes to Share, 2. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, 3. A Year Full of Stories: 52 Folktales and Legends from Around the World, 4. A Child’s Book of Poems by Gao Fujikawa, 5. Disney’s 5-Minute Classic Stories
Bedtime Treasuries
No library is complete—for babies or adults—without a couple of treasuries, books featuring collections of short stories, poems, or both. I love collected volumes because they’re like little libraries unto themselves. I’m calling these “bedtime” treasuries, because these types of books usually don’t have as many pictures as picture books, but often aren’t designed for children to read themselves. They’re the perfect bedtime reads. Little ones can focus on the voice of the reader—without needing to see or engage with the images of the page—so they can get cozy in bed and let the story lull them to sleep (okay, maybe not during the first story, but hopefully by the third or fourth!).
Publishers have recently gotten into a “5-Minute-Stories” frenzy, which is great for an instant collection of a certain character or author. You can find a “5-Minute” collection of just about any popular character or series: Spider-Man, Star Wars, Disney Princesses, Winnie the Pooh, Scooby Doo, Biscuit, Fancy Nancy, Berenstain Bears, Mary Engelbreit, Amelia Bedelia, Little Critter, Richard Scarry, Mickey Mouse, Curious George, Bluey, Peanuts, Peter Rabbit, etc.
You can also find collections designed for certain ages, like Cottage Door Press’ collection that includes 2-Minute-Stories-for-2-Year-Olds and 3-minute Stories for 3-year-olds, or A Treasury of Tales for Four Year Olds: 40 Stories Recommended by Literacy Experts.
I believe at least one fairy tale treasury, one mythology treasury, and one poetry treasury is a must, although my library already has an entire shelf-full.
1. Harry Potter Books 1-4, 2. Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: Books 1-4, 3. Magic Treehouse: A Library of Books 1-28, 4. Bunnicula in a Box, 5. Judy Blume, 6. Roald Dahl Collection
Aspirational Books & Family Favorites (Ages 6+)
In July of 2000, I remember looking at Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Not reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Looking at Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The previous month, I’d both finished 1st grade and turned seven. I was firmly in the “early chapter books” stage of reading. My books still had full-page illustrations, large fonts, and ended before page 100. But the Harry Potter craze had truly begun, Goblet of Fire was the summer’s big release, and my mom made sure our house was prepared.
I knew that behemoth was well beyond my reading abilities, but the cover illustrations completely captured me. I would pull it off the bookshelf, sit on the floor, and study every detail, trying my best to imagine the book within.
Within the year, my mom and I were taking turns reading pages of the Sorcerer’s Stone before bed each night, slowly sounding out each word, and taking breaks to explain some of the bigger, unfamiliar ones. Soon after that, I was reading the final chapters of Prisoner of Azkaban during recess and using the school’s front office phone to call my mom at work and beg her to bring me Goblet of Fire so I could start it at lunch. (The amazing mother she was, she did.)
I think it’s important to include some “aspirational” books in a little one’s library—perhaps on a shelf they can’t quite reach, if they’re still at a page-ripping age. These are books that they may not be ready for yet, but that you want in their periphery in the hopes they’ll capture your little one’s attention and spur them on to the next stage in their reading journey.
After picture books are chapter books (generally for ages 6-8, like Roald Dahl novels, the Magic Treehouse series, or Goosebumps), followed by middle grade novels (generally for ages 8-12, like the early Harry Potter books or A Wrinkle in Time), and finally YA novels (generally for ages 13+ like the later Harry Potter books, The Hunger Games, and the Fault in Our Stars).
There’s also the “I Can Read!” selection of books, featuring a number of series and characters, that help bridge the gap between picture books and early chapter books, and are useful for teaching a child to read on their own.
I recommend keeping a couple of options in the “next category up” of books, and including a couple of family favorites from categories even beyond that. My little one’s library currently includes collections of Frog and Toad and Winnie the Pooh, The Series of Unfortunate Events, and illustrated Harry Potter editions.
1. Yoto Player 2. Runny Babbit (Yoto Card/Book), 3. Disney My First Christmas Bedtime Storybook (Yoto Card/Book), 4. Winnie-the-Pooh: The Complete Collection (Yoto Card)/ The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh (Book), 5. The Tales of Peter Rabbit (Yoto Card)/ Peter Rabbit Classic Gift Set (Book), 6. My First Halloween Bedtime Storybook (Yoto Card/ Book), 7. Frog and Toad: Audio Collection (Yoto Card)/ Frog and Toad: Storybook Favorites (Book)
Audiobooks
The final section of my little one’s library is our Yoto Player and audiobook collection. Currently, we listen to audiobooks during tummy time, or meal times in the rocking chair. In the future, audiobooks will be used during playtime and to supplement bedtime stories from mom and dad. We like the Yoto because it’s designed for young children to use on their own, like the Teddy Ruxpins of old with less fur. I’ve also made a point to buy both the audio card and physical book of a number of titles, so our little one can “read along” if he wants. I also recorded myself reading picture books, so that he can listen to me read even when I’m not physically present. Introducing your little one to audiobooks has a ton of benefits, and will help develop their enjoyment of reading, not hinder it.
Outside of the Yoto, there are other child-operable audiobook options like the Toniebox, Lunii, Storypod, good old Teddy Ruxpin, and if you just want to dip your toes in a “Me Reader” set.
Additional Resources
Brightly is a website devoted to helping parents inspire a love of reading in children with tons of recommendations, printables, “storytimes,” crafts, advice, and much more. I highly recommend it!
NYT BOOKS: HOW TO RAISE A READER
This is a great guide from the New York Times with advice to parents for nurturing a child’s love of literature. It has tips for reading to babies to making sure reading is fun for an independent reader. It’s also available as a book, in longer format.
NYPL’s BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS LIST
Each year, the New York Public Library creates a list with some of the best new books for children. It’s a wonderful list and resource for parents who are just dipping their toes back into the world of children’s literature.
LITERATI KIDS / BOOKROO
A book subscription service can be a fun way to discover new books and build your library, if you’re interested in a couple of surprise, expertly curated picks coming your way. Literati Kids has a box for ages 0-4 and Bookroo has a box for ages 0-3.
