Books like The Very Busy Spider
By Eric Carle
For the kid who won't be pulled off task once they've started something — this book hands them a spider who feels exactly the same way. Gentle, rhythmic, and quietly satisfying, with a farmyard chorus of sounds running through it.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A true story of a small boy in New Orleans's Tremé neighborhood who plays a trombone twice his size, chasing music even without money for an instrument, until Bo Diddley calls him up on stage.
A determined girl finds old boards and decides to build a fort, and when her brothers laugh instead of helping, she teaches herself how to build it anyway.
With a baby on her hip and laundry still waiting, a no-nonsense creator demands light and dark, earth and sky, and every living creature into being — then sits back satisfied with what she's made.
A folk hero grows so fast he bursts through the porch roof, then grows into a legend — swinging two sledgehammers to build roads and racing a steam drill through a mountain.
A real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
A quiet, piano-loving boy — the son of a man once enslaved — grows up to compose music so joyful and rhythmic it earns him a new name: the King of Ragtime.
A Victorian artist named Waterhouse Hawkins sets out to show the world what dinosaurs looked like by building the first life-size dinosaur models, first in England, then in New York City.
A collection of poems invites young readers through seven die-cut doorways into moods and moments — a dragon piñata, an alligator on the A train, a hungry yeti — turning everyday feelings into flights of imagination.
A joyous celebration erupts at Harlem's Schomburg Library in honor of Langston Hughes, as word-children like Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka gather to dance, stomp, and recite poems at their hero's feet.
A brown bear, a red bird, a yellow duck, and other colorful animals appear one by one, each asked the same singsong question about what it sees next.
