Books like Oh, the Places You'll Go!
By Dr. Seuss
Oh, the Places You'll Go! names the wobbly feeling before a big change even hits, then swings straight into soaring highs and lonely slumps, all in that bouncy rhyme kids start reciting on their own. It lands right when your kid is nervous about something new. Here are more books for that same wobbly, excited feeling.
Same wandering-the-world spirit, but Louise, The Adventures of a Chicken by Kate DiCamillo keeps it goofy the whole way instead of building toward a big send-off speech.
Same nervy hope that a big dream might actually work out. Dancing in the Wings by Debbie Allen puts that hope on a stage instead of a mountain.
The rhyming push toward courage carries over, but Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges gives that nerve an actual dragon to face down.
The big send-off energy shrinks down to one shy hippo deciding whether to jump in. But Not the Hippopotamus by Sandra Boynton is quieter, but that yes still lands.
Reach for Chester the Worldly Pig by Bill Peet when your kid wants the striving-toward-a-dream feeling without any of the rhyming pep talk.
That same soaring-to-great-heights feeling, but The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein makes it a real quarter-mile-high walk instead of a metaphor.
A young ballet student doubts she'll ever dance well enough, until an older dancer with skin like hers tells her how she once stood exactly where the girl stands now.
Where Seuss keeps things loose and rhymey, Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns by Duncan Tonatiuh roots the same never-give-up spirit in an actual ancient myth.
The cheerful push-through-anything spirit is here too, but The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley roots it in one real person's actual, unlikely life's work.
A girl named Geraldine knows in her heart that she's a fairy princess, so she wears her royal attire, practices flying, and looks for problems to solve — scabby knees and all.
Shorter and quieter than the graduation-shelf staple, Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman reads more like a wish whispered over a crib.
The true story of Tony Sarg, a self-taught puppeteer whose childhood love of inventing gadgets and moving figures led him to create the giant helium balloons that still float above the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
