Best Books About Friendship for First Graders

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Something changes about friendship in first grade, and it catches parents off guard. The developmental psychologist Robert Selman spent his career mapping how children understand relationships, and he described a shift that tends to arrive around six or seven. Before it, a friend is mostly somebody who does nice things for you. After it, friendship becomes a trade, and it holds as long as both sides think it is fair. Researchers writing about his levels put the ages roughly there, with plenty of variation between children.

That one shift explains most of what lands on you at pickup. The score-keeping. The falling-out over whose turn it was. The phrase "you're not my friend any more", deployed with real intent and then forgotten by teatime. Your child is not being difficult. They are running a new and fairly demanding piece of social software for the first time, and they are not good at it yet.

So the books below are chosen for that. They also do something the earlier lists on this site cannot, because a first grader is reading. Two of these your child will finish alone, which matters more than it sounds like it does: a book about friendship that a child conquered by themselves carries more weight than one you read at them. If your child is a little younger, the kindergarten friendship list is the right rung.

1. Sharing Silver — best for the child who is working out what to give

Silver the Super Pup meets Bandit, a dog who takes. What follows is not a lecture about being nice. It is a demonstration, run through Olivia's music and Benny's waterwheel and a whole forest that gives back to the animals who give, that generosity is how you end up with people around you. For a six year old mid-way through Selman's shift, that is the missing half of the picture. They have worked out that friendship is a trade. They have not worked out that you have to go first.

It is number one for a first grader specifically because it gives them something to do on Monday morning. "Go first" is a move a child can perform at a lunch table. "Be kind" is not. Sharing Silver is written for ages three to seven, which puts a first grader at the top of the range, and that is a good place to be with this one: the story is simple enough to read in a sitting and the idea underneath it is the one they are currently living through. The superhero-training frame does the rest. Nobody is being told off, so nobody gets defensive.

“The kindest animals have the most friends, and those who help the most have helpers everywhere.”

Sharing Silver is a superhero training story about sharing and giving, written for ages 3 to 7. The one that shows a child why other children come to them.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

You can read a sample of Sharing Silver first if you want to hear the voice before you buy.

2. Frog and Toad Are Friends — by Arnold Lobel

This is the one your child reads to you, and that is the entire reason it sits at number two. Five short stories, sixty-four pages, HarperCollins' I Can Read line, and a friendship built almost entirely out of small considerate acts: waiting, waking each other up, writing a letter to a friend who has never had one. Frog is patient and Toad is anxious and neither of them is trying to fix the other, which is a quietly radical thing for a children's book to model. It won a Caldecott Honor in 1971. Buy it if your child is decoding well enough to be proud of finishing something, because the pride and the friendship lesson arrive in the same package. Amazon lists the paperback at grade level Preschool to 3. View Frog and Toad Are Friends on Amazon →

3. The Invisible Boy — by Trudy Ludwig

Brian is the child nobody notices. Patrice Barton draws him in grey pencil while the rest of the class is in full colour, and as he gets included the colour arrives on him too, which every child works out for themselves about four pages in. Nobody in this book is a villain. Brian is not bullied, he is simply not thought of, and that is the accurate version of what most left-out first graders are dealing with. What turns it around is one new boy writing him a note. Small, doable, exactly the scale of thing a six year old can copy. Knopf hardcover, forty pages, published October 2013, listed at grade 1 to 4. Read this one together. View The Invisible Boy on Amazon →

4. Each Kindness — by Jacqueline Woodson

Chloe turns away a new girl, Maya, again and again. Then Maya moves away, and Chloe does not get the chance back. That is the book. There is no reconciliation scene, and Woodson very deliberately refuses to give you one. It is the reason some parents put it down and the reason teachers keep it: a first grader is old enough to sit with the discomfort, and the ending does more work than an apology would. It took a Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 2013, with paintings by E. B. Lewis. Nancy Paulsen Books, thirty-two pages. Do not leave this one for bedtime reading alone, though. It wants a conversation afterwards. View Each Kindness on Amazon →

5. Ivy & Bean — by Annie Barrows

Bean is loud and lands herself in trouble. Ivy is quiet and reads about witchcraft. Each has decided in advance that she will not like the other, and the book is about how completely wrong that turns out to be. As a friendship story for six and seven year olds it is unusually honest, because the girls become friends by committing to a scheme together rather than by learning a lesson. As a reading milestone it is a proper first chapter book: 120 pages, short chapters, Sophie Blackall's drawings on most spreads so it never feels like a wall of text, and a long series behind it if it lands. Chronicle Books paperback, listed at reading age six to eight. View Ivy & Bean on Amazon →

6. Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea! — by Ben Clanton

For the first grader who has decided reading is not for them. Narwhal is relentlessly delighted by everything. Jelly is a sceptical jellyfish. Between them they start a pod, invent a waffle, and demonstrate what it looks like when two friends with opposite temperaments simply enjoy each other. Told in speech bubbles across sixty-four pages, it is the graphic-novel bridge that gets read four times in a week by children who will not touch a chapter book, and the friendship in it is genuinely warm rather than incidental. Tundra Books hardcover, October 2016, listed at reading age five to eight. View Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea! on Amazon →

How to choose one, and what to do after you close it

Start with what is actually happening. If your child is on the outside of a group, that is The Invisible Boy together and Sharing Silver for the move they can make themselves. If your child is the one doing the excluding, and plenty of perfectly kind six year olds go through a spell of it, that is Each Kindness, and you want to be in the room. If friendship is fine and reading is the battle, take Narwhal or Ivy & Bean and let the friendship lesson arrive as a side effect of a book they finished.

Then do the small thing that makes any of them stick. Ask one question the next day, not that evening, and make it about the character rather than about your child. What should Chloe have done. Why did the new boy write the note. Six year olds will discuss another child's dilemma at length and go silent the moment it becomes theirs, so use the character as the way in. And resist tidying the endings. Each Kindness in particular is doing its work precisely because it does not resolve.

For more, see our full guide to raising a kind, sharing friend, the best books about being a good friend for the keeping-friends half of the skill, and what to do when your child has no friends if this is a term-long pattern rather than a bad week.