Best Books About Kindness for Elementary Students (Ages 6–10)

Super Silver Academy is reader-supported. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you.

Parents usually go looking for this list after something specific. A teacher mentioned that your child has been leaving someone out. Or your child came home and said nobody would play with them. Or you have simply noticed the shift that happens around first grade, where the social world gets sharper and a bit colder, and the sweet four-year-old who hugged everyone now has opinions about who is annoying.

Elementary-age kindness books are a different job from the ones you read at three. A preschool book can end with everybody happy. A book for a seven-year-old can afford to leave things unfixed, and that is exactly what makes it stick, because children of this age are old enough to feel a regret they cannot undo. Half the titles below end somewhere uncomfortable. That is not an accident.

One piece of research changed how I use them. Kristin Layous and colleagues, publishing in PLoS ONE in 2012, worked with nine to eleven year olds across Vancouver classrooms. One group was asked to do three acts of kindness a week for four weeks; the other was asked to visit three places. Both groups became happier over the month. The difference was social: the children doing kind acts gained significantly more peer acceptance, meaning classmates named them more often as someone they would like to work or play with. Being kind made them better liked. Reading about kindness was never going to do that on its own, so treat every book here as the setup and the week afterwards as the actual lesson.

Six below. Two are about being left out, one is about being the one in the wrong, one is about noticing what is good in an ordinary day, and one is about a name.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that gives a child a rule to carry into class

Bandit is a young dog with a talent for trouble. He raids a beehive in the opening pages, gets stung, and Silver the Super Pup does not lecture him about it. He walks him around Friendship Forest and lets him watch instead. Olivia the owl gives her music away and the forest gives back. Benny builds a waterwheel that serves everybody. Greedy Gus sits on a pile of cookies with nobody to eat them with. My children worked out where that was heading long before Bandit did, which is the point.

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

Sharing Silver: a superhero training story about sharing and giving, for ages 3–7. Our top pick for this age because it hands a child a working explanation of why kindness pays, which is the question a six or seven year old has actually started asking.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

It leads this list because of the mirror idea running through it: the world reflects back what you put into it. Psychologists have a formal name for the grown-up version, the norm of reciprocity, and no seven-year-old needs the term. What they need is to watch it happen three times in one story to characters they like, and then hear it in one line they can repeat. That line about the kindest animals having the most friends is doing the same work the Vancouver study measured, in language a child can hold.

Be straight with yourself about the age band, though. Sharing Silver is written for three to seven, so it lands best in first and second grade, and a confident nine-year-old will find it young. For six and seven it is the strongest thing on this list, and it is the only one here written to teach the mechanism rather than to tell a story that happens to be about kindness. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver before you buy, and how Sharing Silver teaches generosity breaks the lesson down beat by beat if you want something to talk about afterwards.

2. Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson

Maya is new, and Chloe and her friends never let her in. Not cruelly, just steadily, day after day. Then Maya moves away, Ms. Albert gives a lesson about how small kindnesses ripple outwards like a stone dropped in water, and Chloe is left holding a chance she can no longer take. There is no reconciliation. Woodson refuses to give you one, and that refusal is why this is the single best kindness book for this age group. Written by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis, published by Nancy Paulsen Books in 2012, and the winner of a Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the Jane Addams Children's Book Award. Read it yourself first, and expect questions at bedtime. View Each Kindness on Amazon →

3. The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig

Brian is not bullied. He is simply never noticed, never picked, never invited, and Patrice Barton draws him in grey while everyone around him is in colour. As the story goes on and one new classmate starts including him, the colour arrives. My children spotted that before I did. This is the book for the quiet child at the edge of the class and for the popular child who has never once thought about them, and its version of kindness is small and achievable: notice somebody, then say something. Published in 2013, aimed at roughly six to nine, and there is a discussion section at the back if you want the questions written for you. View The Invisible Boy on Amazon →

4. Enemy Pie by Derek Munson

Jeremy Ross moves in down the street, laughs when the narrator strikes out at baseball, then throws a trampoline party and invites everyone except him. That earns Jeremy the top spot on the enemy list pinned up in the tree house. Dad offers to bake enemy pie, on one condition: the boy has to spend a whole day playing with Jeremy first. You can see the ending coming and it does not matter at all. What makes this one useful is the narrator, because he is the unkind one and the book never humiliates him for it. A child who has been unpleasant to somebody will let this story in when a book about a victim just makes them defensive. Published by Chronicle Books in 2000, illustrated by Tara Calahan King, and it reads best around five to nine. View Enemy Pie on Amazon →

5. Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña

CJ rides the bus across town with his grandmother after church, complaining the whole way about the things his friends have that he does not, and she answers every complaint by pointing him at something he is not looking at. They end up at a soup kitchen, where he turns out to be a regular. It is the least preachy book here and the broadest, because the kindness is quiet and habitual rather than a single good deed. Illustrated by Christian Robinson, published in 2015, and it took the 2016 Newbery Medal along with a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor, which is a rare haul for a picture book. Roughly five to nine, and the grandmother is worth the price on her own. View Last Stop on Market Street on Amazon →

6. Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes

Chrysanthemum loves her name until the first day of school, when Victoria points out that it is long, it is strange, and it is a flower. She wilts a little more every day. What rescues her is a teacher who mentions, offhandedly, that she is thinking of naming her own baby Chrysanthemum, and the whole classroom flips overnight. Henkes is showing something children rarely get told outright: teasing is usually about status, not about the thing being teased. Published by Greenwillow Books in 1991, an ALA Notable Book, and best around four to eight, so this is one for the younger half of elementary. View Chrysanthemum on Amazon →

How to choose between them

Pick by what actually happened this week. If your child is the one leaving somebody out, it is Each Kindness. If they are the one being left out, it is The Invisible Boy. If they have decided they hate a specific child, it is Enemy Pie. If somebody is being teased for something they cannot change, it is Chrysanthemum. If nothing has happened and you simply want kindness in the room, it is Last Stop on Market Street. And if the question underneath is why bother being kind at all, start with Sharing Silver, which is the only one that answers it directly.

Two things about the reading itself. Do not finish with "so what should we always do?" The question turns a story into a rule, and rules are the thing children of this age have already learned to nod at while thinking about something else. Ask what they would have done instead, and be ready for an answer you do not like. Then attach one small job to it, because of what the Vancouver study found: the kindness has to be done, not discussed. Three acts of kindness a week is a workable target for a seven-year-old, and it is more useful than any book on this page.

For younger children, best books about kindness for kindergarten covers ages five and six and best books about kindness for preschoolers covers three to five. Best books about sharing and kindness is the wider list all of these sit inside. When you want things to try rather than things to read, how to teach kids kindness and kindness activities for kids are the practical companions, and helping a child who's being bullied is the one to read if this has gone past unkindness.