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Skill-Building Book Tips

Turn storytime into skill-building time.

These free, downloadable resources offer tips for building children’s life skills based on classic and diverse children’s books.

With content customized to each book, Book Tips help boost science-driven learning, fun and engagement between children and adults. These resources are available in English and Spanish and designed for three age groups, infants and toddlers, preschoolers and school-age.

Educators can also access Book Tips through a partnership with First Book, a nonprofit social enterprise that provides books and educational materials for educators serving children in need.

Books & Tips that Promote Life Skills

Focus & Self-Control

Goodnight Moon

Infant / Toddler
In this classic bedtime story, a rabbit says goodnight to everything in the room. The mesmerizing cadence of the rhymes and the clever details in every picture form a reassuring and calming end of the day tradition for children and adults alike. Available in bilingual and Spanish editions.
Download English
Download Spanish

Critical Thinking

The Runaway Bunny

Infant / Toddler
In this reassuring classic, a loving mother tells her little bunny that no matter where he goes, she will always find him again. Children relate to the little bunny’s desire for independence and enjoy the story’s pattern of cause and effect. Available in Spanish.
Download English
Download Spanish

Communicating

The Lion and the Mouse

Preschool
This wordless Caldecott Medal winner retells one of Aesop’s classic fables. After a lion frees a mouse he’d planned to eat, the mouse rescues him from a poacher’s trap. It’s a beautiful book about the importance of showing kindness.
Download English
Download Spanish

Focus & Self-Control

The Best Seat in Second Grade

School Age
Sam feels he has the best seat in his classroom: right next to the class hamster. Yearning to show the hamster the world outside his cage, Sam sneaks him along on a class trip to the science museum, then loses him in the Hamster Habitat! ACK!
Download English
Download Spanish

Making Connections

When You Reach Me

School Age
The prize-winning book, When You Reach Me is a suspenseful and clever story about a girl trying to prevent what appears to be a tragic death.
Download English
Download Spanish

Taking on Challenges

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

School Age
In this prize-winning book, Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse, has to move her family or face almost certain death when the field where they live in the winter is plowed but one child is too sick to move. To save her family, she visits a wise mouse with medicinal potions, flies on the back of a crow, and puts sleeping powder in the bowl of a dangerous cat. She is aided in her escape by highly intelligent rats—escapees from experiments at NIMH—and she, in turn, helps them.
Download English
Download Spanish

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