How to Choose a Picture Book for Ages 3-7: A Teacher's Checklist
Read-Aloud Tips
A former kindergarten teacher's seven-point checklist for choosing picture books children ask for again - and the ones to leave on the shelf.
I once read the same picture book aloud forty-one times in a single term. You learn things about a book on the thirty-fifth reading, and most of what you learn is about whether it was a good choice in the first place.
So here is the checklist I use in a bookshop, in about ninety seconds. It isn't about taste - there are wonderful books here that fail one of these and are still worth owning. It's about which books survive repetition, because the books children ask for again are the ones that teach them to love reading.
1. Can you read it aloud without wincing?
Open it and read a page out loud, quietly, standing there. If the sentences fight your mouth - clumsy rhythm, a rhyme that doesn't land, a word you'd never say - it won't improve on the twentieth night.
This is the single most reliable test, and it costs thirty seconds.
2. Is there one clear problem?
Not a theme, not a lesson. A problem a four-year-old can state in their own words: he lost his home. She has to find the stream. Books with three tangled problems get abandoned halfway; books with one get finished and requested again.
3. Does the art reward a second look?
Turn two or three pages and look for something that changes - a small animal following along, a background that shifts with the weather, a face doing something different from the text. That's what makes the fifth reading interesting for the adult, and it's what teaches children to look at pictures carefully.
4. Is the text doing work the pictures already do?
If the words describe what's plainly visible ("he is a green frog sitting on a leaf"), there's nothing left for a child to notice. The best picture books leave gaps: the text says he's worried, the picture shows his hands.
5. Does it end warmly?
Not necessarily happily - but resolved, and safe. A child who is still anxious at the end has been given a job they can't do. Warm endings are why bedtime reading works at all.
6. Can you shorten it out loud?
Good read-aloud books can be trimmed live: skip a clause, drop a descriptive line, and the story still runs. As a teacher, that ability is the difference between a book that works in a group and one that only works one-to-one. Look for sentences that are doing one job, not three.
7. Would you happily read it forty times?
Be honest. You're going to. If the answer is no, put it back - there are thousands of others, and the book you resent is the book that ends up at the bottom of the pile while the routine quietly falls apart.
Applying it to my own books
I'd rather show you the checklist working than just hand it over:
- Cuddles Loses His Home - one problem (a lost koala needs a home), a warm ending, and a lot of small bush details in the art that change on the second look. Fails only if you dislike koalas.
- Penny and the Silver Stream - a bigger problem (the stream stops sparkling and the forest depends on it), which makes it the one I'd pick for a five- or six-year-old who wants a real adventure.
- 25 Easy Baking Recipes For Kids - the odd one out, because it's a kitchen book rather than a story. It passes test 1 by being short, and test 6 by being trimmable.
You can see all of the books here, and if you'd like to know who's writing them, there's a bit about me here.
A note for the person doing the reading
If you're the grandparent, the childminder, or the parent on their fourth night of the same book - this checklist has a second purpose. A book that passes test 7 is a book that gives you something on the fortieth reading. That's not a luxury. It's the reason the routine survives the year.
And if the grown-ups in your house want something written for them for a change, there's the grown-up shelf as well.
Read a page out loud in the shop. Everything else follows from that.