Children's books for spring 🌼
Can we read? 2026 Special edition on spring
This spring, I wish you all the fresh possibilities the season brings, the patience to look closely, and the grace to receive the gifts of the world.
May you be blessed with the changes you need.
May you step outside even when it’s unpleasant or messy (and let “it” apply to many things).
May you reset with ease.
May you feel the wind on your face and the sunshine in your soul.
May you find and enjoy at least one excellent puddle.
And may you notice something, anything, that changes the way you see everything.
When Spring Comes by Ekaterina Trukhan (2025)
🍼 Babies & Toddlers (0–3)
This sweet, colorful new title — part of a seasonal series that reminds me of Anne Rockwell’s — is one of those deceptively simple picture books that understands something essential about the smallest children: wonder is a practice.
Built around the gentle refrain, “When spring comes…,” the reader follows a toddler through her day as she notices birdsong, buzzing bees, soft grass, puddles, and rainbows — all the things little ones pay attention to that grownups have grown too busy or too jaded to see.
Trukhan’s digital illustrations are clean and warm, and do much of the storytelling work, and the story here is: slow down. Look closer. Spring isn’t just a season — it’s a way of paying attention.
James and the Rain by Karla Kuskin, illustrated by Reg Cartwright (originally published in 1957, reprinted in 1995)
🍼 Babies & Toddlers (0–3)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
On a rainy, rainy day, James does what children (and poets) do best: he goes out to find out what it means. What follows is a kind of wandering inquiry — he asks each animal he meets, “What do you do in the rain?” And each responds with their own delightful rainy-day logic.
Kuskin was a terrific poet, so the text is where her talent shines — humming with rhythm and rhyme, a tremendous pleasure to read aloud. Its momentum is curious, associative, just a little bit sideways, allowing children to follow the music of language as much as the thread of the story. (Which, it should be said, is barely a thread at all, and that’s exactly the point.)
Cartwright’s oil paint illustrations lean into that same playful energy, and the world he creates in the rain is not one of inconvenience, but rather invitation. The best part is the underlying message that nothing shuts down in the rain, merely changes, and so the question is: can you change with it?
Thunder Bunny by Barbara Helen Berger (2007)
🍼 Babies & Toddlers (0–3)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
This quiet, meditative story is almost disarmingly simple, but it’s also soothing in a way that works before you even realize it.
“Thunder Bunny was a surprise.” She appeared out of nowhere, and from the start, there’s just something about her. When she insists she came from the sky, her siblings scoff at her — until Thunder Bunny proves it’s true through a series of strange actions that bring her up, up, up into a storm cloud, into which she tunnels and disappears. After the rain and thunder — the provenance of which is equally bizarre and magical — Thunder Bunny returns to her family a new kind of bunny, one that’s still different, still “something,” but more perfectly herself than before.
Berger’s work is otherworldly, even bizarre — her soft watercolors feel like something you’d find in a wonderful dream — to the point where, after years of reading her books, I suspect it takes a child’s heart to truly understand them fully. Which is the best endorsement I can think of.
Sun Above and Blooms Below: A Springtime of Opposites by Felicia Sanzari Chernesky, illustrated by Susan Swan (2015)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
I love a good concept book, and this one, part of a seasonal series that explores early math like color, counting, and shapes, is especially well done. Little readers learn about opposites as big/little, wet/dry, up/down — and some more unexpected ones, like crooked/straight, sleeping/awake, broken/whole — are deftly and poetically woven into a story about young students with spring fever, visiting a nearby farm.
The rhyming text is fun — and don’t ever underestimate the deep delight of a line like, “A rooster crowed atop the coop. At the bottom, chicken poop!” Swan’s vibrant and busy digital collage-style illustrations are full of things to notice, point at, and talk about.
This is an excellent way to build vocabulary through the sensory world — the more language we can provide children for the things they experience and feel (including literally), the better able they are to understand it all. (I wish understanding it all as an adult was as simple as naming “wet/dry,” but we all start somewhere!)
Rechenka’s Eggs by Patricia Polacco (1988)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
📖 Independent Readers (6–9)
📚 Middle Grade (9–12)
Rechenka’s Eggs is one of those books where, nearly every time I’ve ever recommended it — and I’ve recommended it a lot — a parent or caregiver has followed up awhile later with exclamations of how incredible this book is and how much their children love it.
This is the deeply moving story of Babushka, gifted at painting beautiful eggs that always win first prize at the Easter festival. One day after a snowstorm, she finds a goose that has been injured by a hunter — she brings it home, names it Rechenka, and nurses it back to health. To repay Babushka’s kindness, Rechenka lays an egg every morning until one day, the goose accidentally breaks all of Babushka’s painted Easter eggs. To make up for this, Rechenka begins laying painted eggs, and with these, Babushka once again wins first prize at the festival. On her way home, she sees a flock of geese in the sky, and finds upon her return that Rechenka has left — but not without leaving one last painted egg, out of which hatches a wonderful and lasting gift for Babushka.
Polacco’s paintings are, as usual, vibrant, full of feelings and everyday life, all of which is made wondrous in her hands. Repeatedly in this tender, splendid tale, Babushka speaks of miracles, and the deep beauty of this book lies in the way it posits the possibility that, inside ordinary moments of ordinary lives, the divine resides.
Safe Crossing by Kari Percival (2025)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
📖 Independent Readers (6–9)
📚 Middle Grade (9–12)
I will read anything about amphibians, but this is an excellent new book about caring about something bigger (well, smaller) than ourselves and doing what we can to effect change — a message that not only empowers children, helping them see that they don’t just have to stand by while adults fix things, but shows that even in a big world, small, local action matters.
On a rainy spring night, a family joins a community effort to help frogs and salamanders cross a dangerous road on their way to lay eggs. What begins on wet pavement on a rainy spring night grows into the idea for a wildlife tunnel, a hearing with the Town Council, fundraising, construction, and victory.
There is a lot of information packed into the text here — prepare yourself for questions, especially if you have a curious kid — but what it lacks in lyricism is made up for in Percival’s superb digital illustrations, informed by woodcut printmaking techniques, that just get better with each page.
This book is a beautiful example of what it looks like to raise not just readers, but citizens.
Puddles by Jonathan London, illustrated by G. Brian Karas (1997)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
The morning after a thunderstorm, two siblings go out to play in the puddles and encounter a sparkling world of brightness and blue, “pieces of sky on the ground,” and explore the wet world with all the joy of children on a mushy, muddy spring day.
The narrative here is simple — nothing more complicated than a walk — but London’s language, full of the sweetness of wonder and sensory details one can almost feel, and Karas's evocative colored-pencil illustrations bring this puddle-jumping adventure to vivid life. Little readers always love the magic of everyday life, but older readers can also benefit from the reminder of how good it feels to simply go out into the world and be where your feet are, one puddle at a time.
Wriggle and Buzz: My First Book of Bugs by Simon Mole, illustrated by Adam Ming (2025)
🧒 Preschool–Early Reader (3–6)
📖 Independent Readers (6–9)
It’s always a good sign when I receive a new book and open it, only to immediately go in search of my husband so I can read him a few lines aloud. I did that with several pages in this pitch-perfect new book featuring poems about bugs.
Mole’s humorous text, along with Ming’s fantastic, colorful mixed-media illustrations, offers insight and a new appreciation for many different bugs. From bombardier beetles and slugs to goliath birdeater tarantulas and potato bugs, they showcase what makes each unique, fascinating, and sometimes funny.
The jacket copy says, “…this bright, bouncy introduction to bugs shows the ways that we need them more than they need us,” and that’s it in a nutshell (which is probably why it’s the jacket copy, I know). If you have a nature or science lover, or simply want a terrific new poetry book for spring, look no further.
I also have a Bookshop.org list, Books for spring, with many more recommendations for ages 0-10. I get a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you use this link to make a purchase.
Happy spring 🩷
Sarah
P.S. My subscribers in the Southern Hemisphere, I haven’t forgotten you!
Enjoying my weekly ritual of opening your newsletter in one tab, and my public library's website in another. <3
Great list! Just wish I still had children to read these books to. Mine have sadly all grown up . . .
I love that your about page points to building a culture of reading in the home. So vitally important . . . thank you!