Children's Books About Creativity (Ages 3–8)

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I went looking for this list when one of ours stopped drawing. Not gradually, either. One week there were pictures all over the kitchen table, and the next there was a child telling me he was "not good at drawing" and asking me to do it for him. He was five. Nothing had happened that I could point to, other than that he had started noticing that his dog did not look like a dog.

The lists I found online were all the same shape: a dozen beautiful, imaginative picture books with no guidance about which child they were for. Most of them were about having a wild imagination, which was not our problem. His imagination was fine. It was the paper he had a problem with.

One piece of research is worth knowing before you spend any money, because it changes what you say rather than what you buy. In a study published in 1982, the psychologist Teresa Amabile had girls aged seven to eleven make paper collages at two residential parties. One group was told they were competing for prizes; the other group expected a raffle, so winning had nothing to do with the collage. Independent judges then rated the work. The children who were not competing were rated more creative. The ones who knew they were being judged scored better on technical skill instead, which is the tell: they made safer, neater, tidier work. The children in that study were older than the audience for these books, so hold it loosely, but it matches what most parents can see at their own kitchen table. The moment a drawing becomes something to get right, it stops being something to invent.

The practical version is small. Be curious instead of complimentary. "What's the blue bit?" gets a different child than "that's lovely", because "lovely" is still a verdict, and a child who has already decided they are bad at drawing will file it as one.

If what you actually want is the imagination end of this shelf rather than the creative-courage end, children's books about imagination is the better page.

1. The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds

Vashti sits in art class with an empty sheet of paper and the flat declaration that she cannot draw. Her teacher does not argue and does not demonstrate. She tells her to make a mark and see where it takes her, so Vashti jabs the paper once, angrily. The teacher asks her to sign it, frames it, and hangs it on the wall. What happens next is the whole book: having been told that the angry jab counts, Vashti starts making dots on purpose.

This is the one to buy if your child's problem is the first mark, and it is the best-known book on the subject for good reason. The adult in it never says the drawing is good. She takes it seriously, which is a different thing and the part most of us get wrong. Candlewick, 2003, 32 pages, and Amazon lists the reading age as 4 and up. It is the first of the three books Reynolds calls the Creatrilogy. The Dot on Amazon.

2. Sky Color by Peter H. Reynolds

Marisol is the opposite of Vashti: she cannot wait to paint, and she has volunteered to do the sky on the class mural for the school library. Then she discovers there is no blue paint. The rest of the book is her sitting with that problem. She watches a sunset, dreams that night about a sky swirling with colours, and comes back the next day to mix a sky out of everything except blue.

I put this second because it covers the block nobody writes books about: the child who has the idea, wants to do it, and stops dead because one necessary thing is missing. It is also a quietly good argument for painting what you can see rather than what you have been told things look like. Candlewick, 2012, 32 pages, Amazon reading age 3 to 8. Sky Color on Amazon.

3. Focused Silver: for the child who freezes at the blank page

Silver wants to be a superhero and cannot work out how, so his friend Marianna teaches him one focus skill a day. On day three she finds him in front of a blank sheet of paper, not drawing. "I don't want to. If I draw, it'll look wrong. I don't want people to see." What she does next is the reason the book is on this page. She does not encourage him. She scribbles a deliberately terrible stick figure, one giant leg and two tiny arms, and holds it up: it looks funny, but I started. Then she tells him to make a mark and says it does not matter if it looks bad. He makes a squiggle.

“It's okay not to know, but it's not okay not to try.”

Focused Silver: a story that teaches the superpower of focus, for ages 3–7. Written by us. Here for one scene rather than the whole book.

View Focused Silver on Amazon

Here is where it fits. Focused Silver is not a book about creativity. The word on the cover is focus, the structure is four days of focus training, and three spreads out of twenty-four are the drawing scene. There is no making in it, no art for its own sake, nobody invents anything. What it has that the art books do not is the refusal stated out loud, in a child's own words. And a grown-up drawing badly on purpose, which is the single most useful thing I have taken from any of these books. If art is the point, buy The Dot or Sky Color ahead of it. If the blank page is the point, and it shows up on worksheets and writing as much as on paintings, this is the one that names it. You can read the opening pages free before deciding.

4. What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Mae Besom

A boy has an idea, drawn as a golden egg with legs and a crown. He is uncomfortable with it, tries to ignore it, and finds it will not go away. When he does start showing people, several of them laugh at it. He keeps it anyway, gets used to having it around, and it grows as his confidence does. The picture-book machinery here is unusually good: because the idea is a character walking next to him, a four-year-old can follow the argument without anybody having to explain it.

Buy this one if the problem is not making but keeping. The child who announces a plan, gets a flat response from a sibling or a classmate, and quietly drops it. Compendium, 2014, 44 pages, Amazon reading age 3 to 7, and it is the first of Yamada's What You Do Matters series. What Do You Do With an Idea? on Amazon.

5. Press Here by Hervé Tullet

One yellow dot and a set of instructions. Press it, and on the next page there are two. Press the button, shake the book, tilt it, and the dots multiply, change direction and grow. Nothing on the page actually moves. The child does all of it, the book takes the credit, and both parties know this and go along with it anyway.

It is on a creativity list and not a toddler-activity list on purpose. For a two- or three-year-old it is the earliest version of one idea: something happened because you did it. That is exactly what every book above is trying to rebuild in a five-year-old who has lost it. Chronicle Books, 2011, 56 pages, Amazon reading age 2 to 4, and it spent years on the New York Times bestseller list. Press Here on Amazon.

6. Maybe Something Beautiful by F. Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell, illustrated by Rafael López

Mira lives in a grey city and paints small bright pictures, which she gives away to neighbours because she has nowhere else to put them. A muralist notices one of them. By the end she, the muralist and most of the street are painting the buildings, and the grey town is a work of art. It is based on the real Urban Art Trail in San Diego, which the back matter explains, and López painted the illustrations on wood using the actual East Village buildings as his reference.

This is the one for the child who has got going and is ready for the bigger idea: that making something is not a private hobby, and it can change the place you live. It is also the best-looking book in this list by a distance, which matters more at bedtime than it should. Clarion Books, 2016, 40 pages, Amazon reading age 4 to 7. Maybe Something Beautiful on Amazon.

How to pick one

Work backwards from the sentence your child actually says. "I can't draw" is The Dot. "I don't know what to make" is What Do You Do With an Idea?. "I need the blue one and there isn't a blue one" is Sky Color. Silence in front of a blank page, on any task at all, is the middle of Focused Silver. If the child is still under four, none of that applies yet and Press Here is the whole answer.

Then do the smaller thing that costs nothing. Make something badly in front of them. Not a nice drawing done modestly, an obviously rubbish one, cheerfully. Every book on this list has an adult or an idea in it that is allowed to look wrong first, and that is the part a child copies.