Wee Talkers Gift Guide: Our Favourite Children’s Books To Give As Gifts in 2021
Books make amazing gifts. Kids love reading them (or chewing on them, or playing with them...), and parents love that they fit nicely on a shelf!
But with sooo many great titles out there, and new ones popping up every day, it’s hard to narrow the list down. Sometimes you go into the bookstore or library with great intentions, but end up with analysis paralysis, leaving with whatever’s most visible instead of what you like best.
We’re speech therapists, but sometimes we feel like we’re actually just professional children’s book reviewers 😂 because we read through SO many to find the ones that are developmentally appropriate, age-appropriate, and just overall great. So with this post, we figured we’d put all of that children’s literature knowledge in our brains down on paper, to help you out with your holiday shopping! This list is composed of all the classics we know you and your family will reach for again and again, with our fav must-haves and hidden gems sprinkled in! We hope you love them.
We Love Supporting Local Bookstores
Our favorite way to buy books is through local small bookstores, but we know online shopping through sites like Amazon is super convenient! The links we’ve provided in this list are the best of both worlds. They’re from bookshop.org, an organization that supports local bookstores WHILE making it easy to shop, because it’s all online!
But, head’s up! It’s only for USA readers. If you’re in Vancouver, some of our fav small local bookshops / toy stores are Kids Books in Vancouver, Chorus and Clouds, Collage Collage, and Dilly Dally Kids. For other Canadians, there’s always Indigo, too—which isn’t exactly a small business, but is Canadian!
Our Book Picks For Babies
You Are New
You Are New presents the world to newborn babies, and the world of newborn babies to new parents. It’s very sweet, a little funny, and all about brand new love. We like that it uses rhyming text, because rhyming helps little readers learn new words down the road.
Tip: This is also a great book for preparing a big sibling for a new baby!
Indestructables
Give a book to a baby, and you know what you’ll get: Ripped pages, soggy, gummed corners, and books flying all over the room! Thankfully, a very smart person who knows baby life invented Indestructables, which are rip-proof, waterproof, portable, safe, and 100% made for babies.
Peek-A-Who? Boxed Set
As if these Peek-a-Boo books weren’t already amazing enough, they’re now available in a cute boxed set!
We love that these books use peek-a-boo to encourage engagement, and showcase fun concepts like animals and things that go. Plus, there’s tons of rhyming and opportunities to model sounds and noises, which is great for language development and scores big points with us!
Little You
Little You is a simple book with high-contrast images and a sweet message. You can read or sing it together with your little one, or just enjoy the beautiful illustrations together. We can’t get enough of this book!
Pajama Time
We love books that help teach children routines, or that reinforce the routines they already know. Pajama Time is a great example of that! It uses Sandra Boynton’s classic illustration style and her gift of rhyme and rhythm to bring the story to life, and help your little one get excited about the idea of going to bed.
Wheels on the Bus
This book brings together three things we love: song books, Jane Cabrera, and new takes on classic children’s songs! Wheels On The Bus goes outside the box as all kinds of cute animal friends ride the bus with you. You can “sing” the story, incorporate animal toys, or read the book exactly the way it’s presented. No matter how you enjoy this book together, you won’t go wrong!
Our Book Picks for Toddlers
Poke-a-Dot First Words
We love the Poke-A-Dot books for any child who might need some convincing that books can be fun! The poke-able dots are engaging for littles and offer a new way to interact with books and participate in reading.
The Snowy Day
We love to switch out our books seasonally by buying a few new titles and rotating our current selection or by going to the library and borrowing a few books! The Snowy Day is all about the wonder and awe of the season. It would be a perfect wintertime title to add to your child’s library!
Hooray for Birds
Hooray for Birds was written by the creator of Maisy books—and we love Maisy! It uses tons of rhymes, which are great for language development, and interesting sounds that children are often excited to copy and say. It’s so engaging that it’s sure to capture the attention of even the wiggliest toddler!
Toot Toot Beep Beep
We love teaching toddlers to talk by starting with fun sounds and words that are easier to say. So we really like that this book uses car sounds, like beep beep, toot toot, vroom vroom, and whoosh! It makes the story so entertaining, and makes children excited to copy and join in!
P.S. We also love these books by Emma Garcia—especially if your child likes construction, trains, or big trucks!
Today
In reading Today, your toddler can think about and plan out what their day will be like. They can talk about getting dressed, having breakfast, and all kinds of other routines. We love that this lets them plan and think ahead. We also just love how beautiful this book is. (We’re never mad when a children’s toy or book looks pretty on the shelf!)
brown Bear
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you…
Did you fill in that last word in your head? Yeah, that’s the magic of this classic book! There’s so much predictability and repetition that often, toddlers will start to fill in the words by saying them themselves. If it’s not part of your home library yet, we definitely recommend picking up a copy of Brown Bear!
I Love All of Me
This book celebrates all the AMAZING things your toddler has to love about themselves. Their wiggly toes, their smelly nose...there’s so much that YOU love, and that they’ll see they love too!
Our Book Picks for Preschoolers
Chirri & Chirra, The Snowy Day
This is another perfect seasonal title, which follows woodland animals like foxes, bears, and birds as they hide out in a snowy cave and enjoy the delights of winter. We love this book on its own, but it’s also part of the Chirri and Chirra series, which is so fun and whimsical. Each story is its own little adventure! We recommend checking out the series and picking any titles you think your little will enjoy.
Big Feelings
If there’s one thing preschoolers are great at, it’s feeling big feelings! But, they don’t always have the words to describe those feelings, or the strategies they need to deal with them in positive ways. Big Feelings helps children deal with—you guessed it!—big feelings, as they come up in their daily lives. We highly recommend this title!
Just Ask
The actual description of this book is just so great that we had to let you read it:
“Feeling different, especially as a kid, can be tough. But in the same way that different types of plants and flowers make a garden more beautiful and enjoyable, different types of people make our world more vibrant and wonderful. In Just Ask, United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor celebrates the different abilities kids (and people of all ages) have. Using her own experience as a child who was diagnosed with diabetes, Justice Sotomayor writes about children with all sorts of challenges--and looks at the special powers those kids have as well.”
Need we say more? You’re probably already hitting “Add To Cart”!
When Lola Visits
We love children’s books with illustrations of people in them! And surprisingly, they’re harder to find than you think. In When Lola Visits, your child will follow along as a young girl spends time with her beloved lola—her grandmother from the Philippines—when she visits for the summer. This book is all about tradition, family, and love. We highly recommend it!
Peace is an Offering
This book follows a ground of children from the same neighbourhood as they “find love in everyday things” and “learn that peace is all around”. It uses rhyming, which you know we love, and beautiful illustrations to keep children engaged and help them see the beauty in every day, no matter what’s going on around them.
More Great Book Ideas
#1 Shop All Our Bookshop Picks
If you can’t get enough of our favourite books for littles—and you love the easily shoppable links—click the link below to shop our complete list of favourite titles on Bookshop.org!
#2 Download Our Free Book List
Wish you could pick our brains about the top books we recommend specifically for language development? Good news: You (kinda) can! We put together a downloadable list of all of our favourite titles from our years of pediatric speech therapy. If you’d like a copy, click the button below. We’d love to share it with you!
#3 Join our Songs + Stories membership
With our Songs + Stories membership, your family can access weekly story times and monthly songs and rhymes classes every month, all on demand and led by speech therapists. It’s something they will love, and you can feel really good about.