Best Social-Emotional Books for Kindergarten (One per SEL Skill)

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Kindergarten is the year the gap shows. Four-year-olds are forgiven almost everything. At five the room gets bigger, the day gets longer, and a child is suddenly expected to wait their turn, read a face, lose a game and say sorry without being marched over. Some arrive able to do all of it. Plenty arrive able to do none of it, and the ones who cannot name a feeling are usually the ones expressing it with their hands.

That is the job a read-aloud is genuinely good at. Not teaching the whole of social-emotional learning, which no book does, but slowing one moment down to a single page so a five-year-old can look at it without being in the middle of it. The trick is matching the book to the skill you are actually short of, which is why this list is organised the way it is rather than by how famous the cover is.

The five skills, and what they look like at five

Most kindergarten SEL curricula in the US are built on the CASEL framework, or map themselves onto it. It names five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. CASEL's own wording for the first is “the abilities to understand one's own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts”, and for the third “the abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others”.

In a classroom or a kitchen those five turn into much smaller questions. Can this child say what they feel. Can they do anything with it other than throw something. Can they tell that the child beside them has gone quiet for a reason. Can they keep one friendship going past Wednesday. Can they admit the cup was them. One book per question is more useful than forty books about feelings in general, because you can tell within a week whether it did anything.

It is worth knowing what the evidence does and does not say. Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor and Schellinger published a meta-analysis in Child Development in 2011 covering 213 school-based universal SEL programmes and 270,034 students from kindergarten to high school. Compared with controls, the children in those programmes came out ahead on social and emotional skills, attitudes and behaviour, with academic performance that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement. Those were taught programmes running over weeks and months, often delivered by the class teacher, so it is not evidence that one read-aloud changes a child. What a book gives you is shared language and a moment to point back to. The repetition is what does the work, which is an argument for reading one of these five times rather than five of them once.

The seven books, in order

1. The Color Monster: A Pop-Up Book of Feelings by Anna Llenas

A small monster wakes up with his feelings in a tangle, all the colours knotted together, and a girl helps him sort them into jars: yellow for happy, blue for sad, red for angry, black for scared, green for calm. One feeling per jar, one colour per spread, nothing else going on.

First, because naming is the skill everything else sits on, and this is the book that does it most cleanly. The sorting is the whole point. A five-year-old who can say “I am the red one right now” has given you something to work with, where “I'm fine” and a thrown shoe have not. Kindergarten rooms end up rebuilding the jars on the wall for exactly that reason. One caution: this is the pop-up edition, and pop-ups and twenty-five pairs of hands are not natural partners, so it works better one-to-one or on your lap than passed round a circle. A flat picture-book edition of the same story exists if you need the sturdier one. Union Square Kids, 1 September 2015, 20 pages, grade level preschool to 2. The Color Monster on Amazon.

2. When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry… by Molly Bang

Sophie's sister grabs her toy gorilla, Sophie is knocked over, and the page detonates. She roars, she kicks, she wants to smash the world. Then she runs out of the house, out to a beech tree, climbs it, and sits with the breeze until she is herself again. She goes home. The family is having dinner. Nobody makes a speech about it.

Second, and the one I would buy if anger is the problem in the room. Most anger books explain anger. This one shows a child doing something with it: leaving, moving, finding a place, waiting for the wave to pass, coming back. The colours do the teaching, going hot and jagged at the peak and cooling as she settles, so the five-year-old watching can see the arc of a temper from outside for once. The ending matters too. Sophie is not punished and she is not praised, she just comes back to dinner, which is the most reassuring thing a book can tell a child who has been scared by the size of their own feelings. Scholastic Paperbacks, 1 June 2004, 40 pages, grade level preschool to 3. When Sophie Gets Angry on Amazon.

3. Waiting Is Not Easy! by Mo Willems

Piggie has a surprise for Gerald. Gerald has to wait for it. That is the entire plot, and it is funny for sixty-four pages because Gerald does exactly what a five-year-old does: groans, flops, demands, despairs, announces that the day is ruined. The surprise, when it finally comes, is the night sky full of stars.

Third, for impulse control and the particular misery of being told to wait. It earns its place twice over. The waiting is treated as genuinely hard rather than as a character flaw, which is the respectful version of the lesson, and the two-colour speech bubbles make it one of the few SEL books a kindergartener can eventually read to you. Elephant and Piggie books are also the safest bet for the child who has decided books are boring. Hyperion Books for Children, 4 November 2014, 64 pages, grade level 1 to 3, though five-year-olds take it happily as a read-aloud. Waiting Is Not Easy! on Amazon.

4. The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld

Taylor builds something tall and proud out of blocks. A flock of birds knocks it down. Then the animals arrive one at a time with advice: the chicken wants to talk about it, the bear wants to shout, the elephant wants to remember it, the hyena wants to laugh, the ostrich wants to hide. Taylor turns them all away. The rabbit does not say anything. It just moves closer, and stays, until Taylor is ready to talk, and then to rebuild.

Fourth, and the one adults quietly need as much as the children do. Social awareness at five is usually taught as noticing that somebody is sad, and this book goes a step past it to what you do next, which is mostly nothing. Each animal gets a page, so you can stop and ask whether that would help, and children are sharp about it. Buy it if you have a child who rushes in with solutions, or one who gets angry when a friend cries, and read it before you next want to fix something yourself. Dial Books, 20 February 2018, 40 pages. The Rabbit Listened on Amazon.

5. Sharing Silver

Bandit the dog snatches honey from a beehive, gets stung, and Silver the Super Pup walks him round the forest to show him why that keeps happening. They watch Olivia the owl share her music and get invited to everything. They watch Greedy Gus hoard his cookies and end up eating crumbs on his own. They watch Benny the beaver build a waterwheel that serves the whole valley. By the end Bandit goes back to the bee he robbed and leaves his own squeaky toy by the hive as an alarm.

“The world is like a mirror. It reflects back what you give.”

Sharing Silver: a superhero training story about sharing and giving, for ages 3–7.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

Fifth, and here is what it covers. Of the five CASEL skills this book covers one: the relationship side of giving and helping. It covers it properly, over a whole story rather than in a line, and the mirror idea lands hard with five-year-olds because they can test it by lunchtime. Kindergarten is also its best year, better than preschool, because at a thousand words across twenty-four pages it sits at the top of its three-to-seven band and a five-year-old can hold the whole chain of scenes in their head. What it does not do is teach a child to name a feeling or bring one down. One page has Angry Ann the ant being cross and Silver telling her that anger is like mud on a trampoline, and that is the extent of it: no breathing, no quiet corner, no technique. So it is not the book for the child who melts down, and the four above it are. If your class or your child has the feelings part and is stuck on the taking, this is the one that moves. You can read the opening pages free, or get the paperback on Amazon, and there is a longer write-up of how Sharing Silver teaches sharing if you want the scenes page by page.

6. The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig, illustrated by Patrice Barton

Brian is the child nobody notices. He is drawn in pencil, grey, while the loud children around him are in colour. He is not picked for teams and not invited to parties. Then a new boy, Justin, arrives and gets laughed at over his lunch, and Brian slips him a drawing. By the last pages Brian has colour too.

Sixth, and the one that fixes a problem teachers see and parents often miss, because the quiet child causes nobody any trouble. The colour device is why it works with five-year-olds: nobody has to explain being left out, you can see it, and children spot Brian turning colour before the text says so. Two notes before you buy. The publisher puts it at grade 1 to 4, so it is at the top of the kindergarten band and suits the back half of the year. And the help in it comes from another child, not an adult, which is the point and also the reason to read it to a whole class rather than to one child. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 8 October 2013, 40 pages. The Invisible Boy on Amazon.

7. Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto, illustrated by Ed Martinez

Maria tries on her mother's diamond ring while they are kneading masa for Christmas tamales. Later she realises the ring is gone, and decides it must be inside one of the twenty-four tamales. So she and her cousins eat their way through the whole batch, grimly, to find it. The ring turns up on her mother's finger. Maria has to walk over and say what she did.

Seventh, for responsible decision-making, which sounds like a committee word and in kindergarten means owning the thing you broke. The walk across the kitchen is the real story, and children recognise the panic that leads up to it, the hiding and the terrible plan to put it right without telling anyone. The family laughs and makes a fresh batch together, which is the ending a five-year-old needs in order to risk telling you something next time. The Christmas setting makes it seasonal, and it is the one book here that is also about a family rather than a classroom. Puffin Books, 8 August 1996, 32 pages, reading age 4 to 8. Too Many Tamales on Amazon.

How to choose, and what to do after you read it

Buy for the skill that is actually missing this month. Cannot name it: The Color Monster. Names it by throwing something: When Sophie Gets Angry. Cannot bear to wait: Waiting Is Not Easy!. Rushes in to fix a crying friend: The Rabbit Listened. Takes without giving: the Silver one. Walks past the child on their own: The Invisible Boy. Hides the broken cup: Too Many Tamales.

Then read it more than once. The temptation with a list like this is to get through all seven in a fortnight, and the research on SEL points the other way: repetition and practice over time is what moved the numbers in those 213 programmes, not exposure. Read one book three or four times across a week, ask a single question afterwards rather than a quiz, and use the words again when the real moment arrives. “You went red there, like the monster. Do you want the tree or the cushion?” is worth more than another new story, because it hands the child the thing the book was for at the exact second they need it.

For the year either side of this one, social-emotional books for preschoolers covers ages 3 to 5, where the lists have to be shorter and the feeling has to be on the face, and social-emotional learning books for kids picks it up for six and over. By single skill there are kindness books for kindergarten, friendship books for kindergarten, books about anger and books about self-control. If the bigger worry at home is meltdowns rather than reading, start with emotional regulation, and the full parent guide is raising a kind, sharing friend.