You Can Be ABCs
What a great board book! This is one I encourage my older children to read to my little ones. One of the big hurdles for kids growing up is that they don’t know what jobs there are, so they don’t know what they’re studying and working toward someday. The illustrations are charming, showing kids from all sorts of backgrounds doing all sorts of modern and contemporary jobs. For example, U is University President and G is for Gastroenterologist! I didn’t ever think I’d seen that one in an ABC board book before! The rhyming text is engaging and a delight to read, including for my older kids, who’ve asked questions about what, exactly, these different jobs actually do, along with related fields of work and study. This book has a dynamite impact yet is so accessible and fun.

Little Bunny, Spring Is Here!
This is a delightful board book that has “instant classic” written all over it! It features a little bunny and a growing group of woodland friends who go looking for spring. The rhymes are fun to read and, judging from my children’s repeated requests to read and reread it, a delight to hear. The illustrations are colorful and charming, all while explaining the different natural changes the world makes when spring arrives. I should note that, although it features a bunny and Spring, it is not an Easter season book; it’s just about the natural changes we often see each spring — rainfall, rainbows, flowers blooming, and more.

This Is Ballet: And Other Classical Dances
This is another surprising board book (at least for me)! It offers lovely colored pencil illustrations alongside a definition of “classical” dancing which I was unfamiliar with — meaning formal dancing performances, including ballet, Indian dancing, Japanese Kabuki, and synchronized swimming. The book is explanatory and seems perhaps originally geared toward older children, as it explains various basic dance movements (including pronunciation) in ballet. If your kids are going to take dance lessons, or their older siblings are taking dance, this would be a great board book to get them thinking about dancing from a young age.

Birding for Babies
Over the years, I’ve developed two approaches to reading books to my children. For my older kids, I’ll read them word for word. But, for my babies or toddlers, I’ll often explain the pictures to them, using simple words they understand. This is one of the latter. Like the other board books here, the text skews older than I’d have expected from a board book. It makes the books fun to read for older kids, but for the little ones, I’m unsure if this book’s rhyming explanations and sidebars(!) would always make sense to my little ones. Happily, that means that I can explain the dynamic and colorful illustrations of birds around the world to my youngest, like the page on light and dark, and explain that some birds sing during the day or only at night. Meanwhile, her older siblings can enjoy every factoid, such as the olive-backed sunbird is native to Asia and Australia, while the Central and South American potoo bird sings only at night.