Children's Books About Imagination (Ages 2–8)

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Ours arrived with a washing machine. The box it came in lasted eleven days and was, in order, a submarine, a shop, a bed, a rocket and finally a den with a letterbox cut in the side. Nobody had read a book about it. That is the awkward thing about this shelf: children already know how to do this, and the good books do not teach it so much as give them permission and a few more ideas.

One thing to hold on to before you spend any money. Pretend play gets sold to parents as essential, and the research is softer than the marketing. The most thorough review of it, by Angeline Lillard and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin in 2013, went through more than fifty years of studies and concluded that the existing evidence does not support strong claims that pretend play causes developmental gains; for creativity specifically, the results were inconsistent. That is not a reason to skip these books. It is a reason to buy them the way you would buy a good meal rather than a vitamin, and to stop feeling behind if your child prefers diggers to dragons.

Seven books, ordered by how much your child has to do. The first four hand over progressively more of the work. The last two are about imagining from a mistake, and imagining with other children.

1. Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

A rabbit sits in a box. An unseen grown-up keeps asking why it is sitting in a box, and the rabbit keeps insisting, in capital letters, that it is NOT A BOX. Every other spread shows what it actually is: a race car, a mountain, a burning building. There is almost no text, which is the point, because the gap between the plain brown-line drawing and the imagined one is where your child does the work. HarperCollins, December 2006, 32 pages, reading age two to five on Amazon. Worth knowing before you buy: it is very short, and a few parents feel short-changed at the price. The value shows up half an hour later when a box appears in the hall. View Not a Box on Amazon →

2. Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

Harold wants a walk in the moonlight, so he draws the moon. Then a path, then a tree, then a boat when the water he drew gets out of hand. It is the cleanest demonstration in children's publishing of the idea that you can invent your way out of a problem, and children copy it almost immediately with whatever pen is nearest. The HarperCollins hardcover edition runs to 64 pages. The trade-off is pace: it first appeared in the 1950s and it is quiet, with dream logic rather than jokes, so a child raised on louder books may need a page or two to settle. From about four it goes down very well, and it rereads better than almost anything else here. View Harold and the Purple Crayon on Amazon →

3. The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires

A girl has a perfect idea in her head and absolutely cannot build it. She tries, it comes out wrong, she tries again, it comes out wrong, and eventually she loses her temper entirely and has to go for a walk with her assistant, who is a dog. This is the one for the child whose imagination is running ahead of their hands, which by about five is most of them. Kids Can Press, April 2014, 32 pages, reading age three to seven. Be ready for the fact that the middle of the book is frustration rather than wonder. That is also exactly why it is useful, and why it pairs well with what to say when a child gives up after one mistake. View The Most Magnificent Thing on Amazon →

4. Journey by Aaron Becker

A lonely girl draws a door on her bedroom wall and goes through it. There are no words at all, which means your child has to narrate, and the first time you read it together you will find out a great deal about how their mind works. Candlewick, August 2013, 40 pages, reading age three to six, and a 2014 Caldecott Honor Book. The honest caution is that wordless books feel like hard work to some adults on the first run, because you cannot hide behind the text. Ask short questions, let silences sit, and let them turn the pages. There are two sequels if it lands, Quest and Return. View Journey on Amazon →

5. Silver and the Forgetful Robot: imagination with a job to do

Simone builds a robot called Bright Spark, he switches on, and his memory does not work. Silver teaches him instead, and the method is pure imagination: turn the thing you want to remember into a picture so silly and vivid that your brain refuses to drop it. Bacon with legs juggling eggs, for a shopping list. A drum falling out of the fridge, for a piece of music. This is not a party trick the book invented. Psychologists call the underlying idea dual coding, and Allan Paivio's imagery research in the late 1960s is a good part of why we know that pairing a word with a mental picture makes it easier to recall.

“The sillier, brighter, and more alive your picture is, the stronger your memory becomes.”

Silver and the Forgetful Robot: a story that teaches memory superpowers, for ages 3–7. Written by us, and on this list for active imagining with a purpose rather than open-ended make-believe — see the note below.

View Silver and the Forgetful Robot on Amazon

Here is where it fits. Every picture in it has a job. There is no den-building, no pretend shop, no child inventing a world for the pleasure of inventing it, and if that is what you came for, numbers one and two are the better buy. It earns its place at number five because the imagining is active rather than watched, and because Silver and the Forgetful Robot gives a child something to do with that skill the next time they have ten spellings to learn. You can read a sample first, and the connection trick, explained for children walks through the core method if you want to practise it together.

6. Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg

A torn page becomes an alligator's mouth. A spilled blob becomes an elephant. A hole becomes somewhere to look through. It is a small, sturdy, interactive book whose whole argument is that a mistake is the start of something, and it is the one I would hand to a child who crumples the paper the moment a line goes wrong. Workman Publishing Company, September 2010, 28 pages, reading age two to six. Two things to know: it is a demonstration rather than a story, so there is no plot to follow, and the flaps and tears invite exactly the kind of handling that eventually destroys them. Ours survived two children, just about. View Beautiful Oops! on Amazon →

7. Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran, illustrated by Barbara Cooney

A hill with old crates, broken glass and stones on it becomes a whole town, with streets, houses, a bakery and a jail, built by a group of children over several summers. It is the only book here about imagining together, which is the version that actually happens in gardens and playgrounds, and it is based on a real place the author's mother played on as a child in Arizona. HarperCollins paperback, April 2004, 32 pages, reading age four to seven, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, who won the Caldecott Medal for Ox-Cart Man. The caution is the voice: it is nostalgic, told looking back, which lands with a five or six-year-old and can go over a three-year-old's head. View Roxaboxen on Amazon →

What to do after the book

The book is the easy half. Three things made a difference here. Leave the raw materials out, because a box, a sheet, some tape and a stick beat almost any toy with a function, and tidying them away each night quietly ends the game. Join in briefly and then get out, because a parent who stays too long starts directing. And resist asking what it is. "What is it?" wants an answer; "what happens in there?" keeps the thing going.

One habit to drop: correcting the physics. The boat that flies, the dog that talks, the floor that is lava on Tuesdays only. None of it needs fixing, and a child who gets corrected once tends to stop telling you.

How to choose between them

Pick by what you want your child to do with it. Act something out immediately is Not a Box. Draw their way out of a problem is Harold and the Purple Crayon. Keep going when the idea will not come out right is The Most Magnificent Thing. Tell the story themselves is Journey. Use imagining to remember things is Silver and the Forgetful Robot. Rescue a ruined drawing is Beautiful Oops!. And build a world with other children is Roxaboxen.

For the shelves either side of this one, best picture books about problem solving is where invention turns into working something out, best growth mindset books covers the child who gives up when the idea is harder than it looked, and best books to improve a child's memory goes deeper on the remembering side of the vivid-picture trick. When you would rather do something than read something, memory games for kids and the full focus and learning guide are the practical companions.