Best Books About Making Friends for Kindergarten (Ages 5–6)

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The sentence that sends most parents looking for this list is some version of nobody played with me today, said in the car on the way home from week two. It is a horrible one to hear and it is usually less serious than it sounds. Five-year-olds swap playmates constantly before they settle, so a child who names a different best friend every evening, or none at all, is behaving exactly like a new kindergartener rather than a lonely one.

What does help is giving your child something to do rather than something to feel. Researchers who study peer entry, the moment a child tries to join a game already in progress, describe the successful version as watching first, working out what is happening, and then joining in on the terms already set, rather than arriving with an announcement or a new rule. Adults do this instinctively at parties. Five-year-olds mostly do not, and it is teachable. A picture book is a good place to teach it, because your child gets to watch somebody else do it before their turn comes.

One thing to know about kindergarten friendship, because it changes what you look for in a book: at this age friendships are made by doing, not by talking. Two children build the same tower and are friends by Friday. That is why the books below mostly show a shared activity rather than a conversation, and it is also why the honest advice to a shy five-year-old is not go and say hello but go and do what they are doing.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that hands a five-year-old a first move

Silver the Super Pup meets Bandit, a dog who takes what he wants and cannot work out why the forest has stopped helping him. Silver does not lecture him. He walks him round the wood and shows him: Olivia's music, Benny's waterwheel, animals who give and get given to. By the end Bandit tries it himself, and it works.

“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 kindergarten pick because it turns making friends into an action a child can take first, before anyone has been friendly to them.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

It leads this list because of the direction it runs in. Nearly every other making-friends book waits for the friendship to arrive: someone notices the child in the corner, someone invites them over. That is a lovely thing to read and a useless thing to act on, because it puts your child in the passenger seat of the one situation they most want control of. Sharing Silver goes the other way. Go first. Hand something over, help with the thing they are already doing, smile before anyone smiles at you, and watch what comes back. For a kindergartener that turns an impossible feeling into a small, repeatable experiment, and the line they carry out of it is the world is like a mirror, which they will cheerfully use on you the next time you are the grumpy one at breakfast. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver before you buy, and the Silver quotes on kindness and sharing are the lines worth keeping on the fridge for the school run.

2. Do Unto Otters by Laurie Keller

Mr Rabbit has new neighbours. They are otters, he has never met an otter, and he panics about how to get along with them until Mr Owl points out the obvious: treat otters as you would have otters treat you. What follows is essentially a manual, delivered in speech bubbles and terrible puns, of everything a kindergartener actually needs on day one. Be friendly. Say please. Share. Say sorry and mean it. Do not tease. It is funny enough to survive being a manual, and it is the book to reach for when your child's problem is not shyness but genuinely not knowing what you are supposed to say to somebody new. Published in 2007, 40 pages, and it reads aloud better than it looks on the page. View Do Unto Otters on Amazon →

3. Strictly No Elephants by Lisa Mantchev

A boy with a tiny pet elephant turns up to the neighbourhood Pet Club and finds a sign on the door: strictly no elephants. He is turned away, and so is a girl with a skunk, and instead of sulking about it the two of them start their own club with a very different sign. This is the one for the child who has already been told no by whichever group has formed itself in the first fortnight. It refuses the usual ending where the mean children learn a lesson and let everybody in, and offers something more useful instead: find the other person standing outside, and go and do something. Taeeun Yoo's illustrations are quiet and the text is short. View Strictly No Elephants on Amazon →

4. Devon Makes a Friend by Jessica Davault

A gentle, straightforward story about the nerves and the small brave steps involved in making a new friend. There is no twist and no big lesson, which is the point. If your child is the one who hangs back at the edge of the playground watching, this is the book that tells them the hanging-back feeling is normal and then shows them what one step out of it looks like. Illustrated by Taylor Thompson. Shorter and simpler than most of this list, so it works well at the younger end of kindergarten or with a child who is not yet sitting through longer stories. View Devon Makes a Friend on Amazon →

5. Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea! by Ben Clanton

Jelly meets Narwhal, decides Narwhal is far too cheerful and possibly imaginary, and is thoroughly suspicious for several pages before the two of them end up starting a pod together. It is a graphic novel in three short chapters, mostly speech bubbles, and it is the funniest first meeting on this list. The reason it earns a place is that Jelly is the reluctant one, and plenty of five-year-olds recognise themselves in that far more readily than in the shy child who wants a friend. First published in 2016; the later books in the series are just as good and tend to get requested immediately. View Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea! on Amazon →

6. Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

Five short stories about two friends who are not remotely alike, first published in 1970 and named a Caldecott Honor book the following year. Nothing much happens. Toad loses a button, Frog tells a story, one of them waits for a letter that takes days to arrive. That is precisely why it belongs here: after the drama of making a friend, this is what having one is like, and a kindergartener who has just managed it needs to know that the ordinary version counts. 64 pages in the I Can Read format, so it works as a read-aloud now and as one of the first books your child reads to you in a year or so. View Frog and Toad Are Friends on Amazon →

7. A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead

Amos is a zookeeper who spends every day making time for his animals: chess with the elephant, a race with the tortoise, sitting quietly with the shy penguin. Then he is off sick, and the animals get on a bus and come to him. Erin E. Stead's illustrations won the Caldecott Medal in 2011 and they are the reason it works on a five-year-old, who follows the whole thing from the animals' faces. Read it when the lesson you want is that friendship runs both ways, and that the small attentive things your child does are the things people come back for. View A Sick Day for Amos McGee on Amazon →

How to choose one

Buy one, not seven, and pick it from the sentence your child actually said. I don't know what to say is Do Unto Otters. They said I couldn't play is Strictly No Elephants. I was scared to go over is Devon Makes a Friend. Everyone else already has a friend is Narwhal, because it is funny and takes the temperature down. And if the friendship has happened but feels thin, that is Frog and Toad or Amos McGee.

Sharing Silver is the one I would buy first regardless, because it is upstream of the others. A child who has already tested the idea that going first tends to come back around will try the rest of it more readily than a child waiting to be chosen.

Then the part that does the work, which is not the reading. Take one line out of whichever book you chose and use it on the way to school, in the ordinary voice you use for everything else, and then drop it. Do not ask how it went at pick-up. Ask what they built, or who was on their table, and let the friendship report arrive on its own.

Worth keeping the two problems separate as you shop. Best books about friendship for kindergarten is about being a friend to someone your child already has: sharing, apologising, standing up for them. This page is about starting from nobody. If your child is younger, the preschool version of this list is gentler, and the general making-friends list spans the whole 3–7 range. For what to do once the book is closed, Raising a Kind, Sharing Friend is the full guide, and when your child has no friends covers the version that has lasted longer than a few weeks.