Choosing the right book for your child can be difficult – especially if you’re not sure what makes a good children’s book. There are thousands and thousands of children’s books available. But, don’t be fooled, not all kids’ books are created equal. To provide your child with quality reading materials, and help them improve their reading skills, it’s important to know what to look for.
Luckily, there are several key qualities of a good children’s book that are easy to spot. To help you choose the best book for your child, we’ve put together a list of the most important characteristics to look for.
Ready to learn what makes a good children’s book? Let’s go!
You might be asking yourself – why are quality children’s books important?
When you provide your child with quality reading materials, you aid their cognitive development, encourage independent thought, and help them learn about the world in a fun and interesting way. Good books also help young readers gain confidence. As a result of this confidence, children often discover joy and excitement in reading. Thus, a self-motivated reader emerges.
You can promote all of these developmental benefits (and more) simply by knowing what makes a good children’s book. So, let’s take a look at the most important characteristics that you should look for.
When searching for a good book for your child, keep these 10 important characteristics in mind.
The interests of a child are key to what makes a good children’s book. By choosing a book that your child will find interesting, you can help promote a love of reading. A captivating book will also increase your child’s engagement, helping to develop their reading skills further.
What makes a book appealing to children? Children often enjoy books that reflect the world around them. This includes books that tell a story they can connect to. When children can relate to a story, they are more likely to remember it and comprehend what they are reading.
Want to find books your child will love? Check out Booka! The Booka App allows you and your child to select books based on interests. For example, explore books about nature, animals, shapes and colors, professions, places, science, sports and outdoors, and more!
Illustrations are an important aspect of what makes a good children’s book – especially for young readers. Illustrations help to draw a child in and capture their attention. In addition to helping engage young readers, illustrations can also support the development of reading comprehension.
Look for books that include illustrations that are detailed, colorful, and connect to the story. You might ask yourself, do the illustrations tell the story? If the answer is yes, the book will help your young reader improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary.
Some great examples of children’s books with beautiful and meaningful illustrations include:
Lula’s Brew by Elizabeth Dulemba
Slumber My Darling by Stephen Foster
The Fable of the Bully Dragon by Jeff Dinardo
How To Hug A Cactus by Emily S Smith
A good children’s book uses rich and interesting vocabulary. Providing your child with books that offer varied language is essential because these books help to capture their attention. Exposure to new, increasingly sophisticated words and grammatical structures is also beneficial, as it provides an opportunity for valuable learning.
What makes a good children’s book in terms of language and vocabulary? Most importantly, the language in a book should support the flow of the story. In other words, the language should make the storyline easy to follow. It is also important that the language is relatable for your child, but with an element of challenge.
Looking for books for your child that use interesting and varied language? Check out these books written by Ellliot Kreloff:
Worth the Wait
Please Don’t Make Me Fly
Good children’s books have relatable characters. When a child reads a book with relatable characters, they become more invested and engaged. This leads to greater enjoyment and promotes a love of reading. In addition, relatable characters promote feelings of empowerment and encourage children to create change in the world around them.
When assessing a book for your child, look for characters who encounter real world problems and emotions. For example, loss, failure, success, sadness, fear, joy, and anger.
Here are some examples of great children’s books that include relatable characters:
Stella…Almost by Wiley Blevins
The On-Again, Off-Again Friend by Wiley Blevins
The Sad Sad Monster by Dolores Costello
Developmentally appropriate books are important because they allow your child to succeed when reading. These feelings of success will further motivate them to read, creating a positive learning cycle. Therefore, like knowing what makes a good children’s book, it is important to understand what makes a book a “good fit” for your child.
So, what makes a book developmentally appropriate? To find a suitable book, there are several elements to consider.
First, evaluate the story’s content. That is, what is the story about, and what message is the author portraying? As mentioned earlier, children are drawn to books that they can relate to and that provide a window into the world around them.
Second, consider the difficulty of the language and vocabulary used in the book. It is important that your child can read most of the words in the story so that they can experience feelings of accomplishment. That said, some challenging language is also important to support your child’s continued development as a reader.
Finally, you want to ensure that your child is comprehending what they are reading. Evaluate comprehension by checking in with your child and asking them questions about the story as they (or you) are reading it.
Discover thousands of developmentally appropriate children’s books on the Booka app, including:
Middle Me by Jeff Dinardo
The Not-So-Right Day by Wiley Blevins
Books provide an opportunity for children to learn and expand their understanding of the world around them. Through books, parents can expose children to life lessons that help them engage with other people, develop ideas, and build new skills. Best of all, presenting these lessons through fun and engaging stories has a much more significant impact than discussing them directly.
What makes a good children’s book lesson? Here are some common and essential lessons to look for.
Looking for stories that include important and teachable lessons? Check out these top children’s books:
My Shadow Is Pink by Scott Stuart
Ice Queen by Jamie Tablason
Sheep in the Closet by Mattia Cerato
Like any great book, a good children’s book should have a captivating plot that grabs the reader’s attention. An engaging plot will increase a young reader’s interest in the story. As a result, they will be more likely to learn a lesson from the book and develop their skills as a reader.
Not sure how to identify a captivating plot? Look for books that will make your child laugh or have them on the edge of their seat. For example, stories with comical situations, unexpected problems that must be solved, and/or surprising reactions from characters.
"Ick and Crud" is one of the very best children’s book series that includes captivating and engaging plots. Check out the Ick and Crud series on Booka.
Books that are structured with a clear beginning, middle, and end allow children to follow and engage with a story more easily. This type of structure also helps children develop the ability to retell stories and build on their reading comprehension skills.
Typically, a good children’s book begins with an introduction to the characters and setting. Then, in the middle, a problem develops that the characters must solve. Finally, the end shares how the characters overcame the problem they were facing.
By exposing children to this easy-to-follow structure, parents can also provide an example of how they can be authors too!
Check out the Problem Solved! series on the Booka app for great stories with clear, easy-to-follow structures.
A story’s setting, or where it takes place, is an important part of what makes a good children’s book. Using descriptive language, an author can bring young readers into the world of the characters. A story that provides a detailed description of the setting, through both pictures and words, helps a child visualize the story as it takes place. This is an important skill and will help your child develop an understanding of what they are reading.
When selecting a book for or with your child, look for a familiar setting. Alternatively, look for books that use descriptive language to provide a window into the setting with the help of a little imagination!
Looking for books with a captivating setting? Check out these favorites:
Milo’s Little Secret by Rebecca Ralfe
Now Appearing Stud by Dhana Fox
Reading and exploring books with your child is an extremely valuable and important part of literacy and language development. Finding a book that you enjoy will allow you to be more engaged and to find satisfaction in sharing and experiencing the story with your child.
When choosing a book, ensure that the story captures your attention. Look for beautiful illustrations, lessons that support your morals and beliefs, and characters that you can relate to.
If you’re looking for a book that you will enjoy just as much as your child, check out the “How It Works” section of the Booka app. Here you’ll find fascinating stories about how things work – from technology and weather to the human body and more!
Now that you know what makes a good children’s book, the question is – where can you find great books for kids? Luckily, Booka makes this easy.
At Booka, we know what makes a good children’s book. To help you find books your kids will love, we have created an easy-to-use app with an amazing collection of books for kids of all ages.
Booka offers numerous benefits for children and parents engaging in at-home reading. When you choose Booka, you gain access to exclusive and unique features, including:
Not only does Booka offer the countless benefits above, but it also incorporates learning through technology – making it the ultimate tool for parents with young readers. Technology is engaging and motivating for children. Therefore, reading apps like Booka encourage an interest in reading.
Want to spend less time searching for a good children’s book and more time reading with your child?
Writing a successful children’s book is a dream that many authors hold close to their hearts.
After all, there are few other types of writing capable of producing nearly as much sheer joy as a children’s book.
Of course, children’s books are a lot of fun to create, and can be incredibly lucrative when they are successful.
However, creating a book for children can be harder than it first seems. The most successful all share several things in common.
By ensuring your own book contains the following five elements, you give it the best chance of being a smash hit, and making countless children around the world smile at storytime.
Table of Contents:
The 5 Elements of an Unforgettable Children’s Book
If you have kids of your own, or if you think back to your own childhood favorite stories, you’ll definitely agree that characters are the most important part of a children’s book.
When a child loves a character, they can enjoy any story featuring that character, no matter what.
If you are able to create a unique and memorable character, you have the opportunity to create a series of books based around that character, and kids will beg their parents for each and every one.
Think about Harry Potter, for example. J.K Rowling’s books contain a wide range of memorable characters with distinct personalities and trademark behaviors. Fans of these characters relate to them almost as they would to real people.
To help ensure your characters are as unique and memorable as possible, take the time to understand exactly what your target audience are looking for.
If you are writing for a particular age group, read the top ten bestselling age books for that group. Do you notice the characters have anything in common? Perhaps they all have distinctive clothing, or certain catchphrases, or some other memorable detail.
Whatever it is, be certain to make sure your own characters have it.
If you can create characters kids fall truly in love with, you have a winning book series on your hands.
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Action and suspense might seem like story elements that are more suited to adult writing, but in reality kids love them.
Some writers fall into the trap of making their children’s book too bland, inoffensive, and frankly boring.
In this day and age, kids have endless opportunities to be entertained. Whether it’s countless TV channels, the latest game on their tablet, or their favorite YouTube channel, they aren’t short of options.
As a result, you need to include exciting events and suspenseful cliffhangers wherever you can.
Imagine a story about a cat who lives on a boat. This could either be a fairly bland tale of daily life on the boat, maybe catching a fish now and then, nothing too exciting. Or, there could be a huge storm, and it’s down to the cat to rescue the boat from disaster.
Which do you think kids would have a better time reading?
Don’t dismiss the power of action and suspense to make a truly gripping children’s story that kids want to read time and time again.
Perhaps the biggest trap for adult writers of children’s books is to write conversation that sounds forced or unbelievable.
After all, as adults, we have our own deeply ingrained way of talking and vocabulary that is miles apart from kids. We can also assume that the way our own kids talk is the way other kids will talk, when in actual fact it really isn’t.
In order to remedy this problem, try and find ways to spend time around the children you will be writing about. This could involve volunteering to read at a school, babysitting kids of the same age, or visiting relatives if they have kids of the right age.
Writers often make one of two mistakes when writing dialogue in children’s stories –
1) Using vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, or emotional responses which are more suited to adult life
2) Overcompensating and trying to “force” the way children speak which results in unnatural and inauthentic dialogue
Only by spending time around real kids of the age you want to write about will you be able to write conversation in a way which sounds authentic and enjoyable for your young audience. Anything else is likely to cause an off putting experience that kids don’t enjoy.
While it’s true that memorable characters are the key to a children’s book, it doesn’t mean the plot and ending can be overlooked.
This is especially true if you are writing a chapter book. You need to include hooks and cliffhangers to keep the kids interested and begging for another chapter.
One of the best ways to do this is to create a problem early in the story which must be resolved. Obviously, as your book is for kids, this shouldn’t be anything too dark or distressing. However, your main character should be placed in some kind of predicament or situation which must be resolved by the end of the story.
As well as this central plot point, you should include plenty along the way to keep kids engaged. This could include temporary setbacks, red herrings, and false resolutions to the problem.
Kids books are places for happy, predictable endings that resolve the problems posed by the story. You should never have a dark or unsatisfying ending in a kids book. Keep it wholesome, emotionally positive, and utterly satisfying.
By taking kids along a rollercoaster of a story with a safe, happy finish, you’ll ensure they want to read your story again and again.
At the risk of sounding corporate, it’s vital that your children’s story has a strong ‘brand’ or identity that sticks with kids.
Too many children’s books end up blurring together due to a lack of anything that makes them truly unique or memorable.
If you nail the right combination of character, story, and conversation, you will create something that sticks out in a child’s mind, and ensures your book is the top of their list whenever they visit the bookstore or library.
Sometimes, creating a story with a lasting identity is as simple as combining two familiar things in an interesting way.
For example, there are plenty of children’s stories about cats, and plenty about space. But a cat in space is a lot more memorable than either element apart!
If you can find a way to put a unique or interesting twist on a tried and tested formula, you stand a great chance of creating a story with lasting identity that children love.
If you can match all of the above elements with attractive artwork, you have a winner.
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