What Are You Looking For?

This is a Moon-colony mystery about a boy seeking answers after his father fails to return from a mission officials deny ever happened.

This is an activity-led nonfiction book: readers can learn and practise tricks, then consider how presentation, preparation and originality affect a performance. It suits shared experimentation as much as quiet reading.

This offers lively, illustrated fact-finding about animals’ unusual abilities, habitats and survival. It suits browsing and dipping in, while its dense presentation may make sustained independent reading more demanding.

This is primarily a creative activity book: children can colour line illustrations inspired by warm, seasonal scenes featuring a fennec fox and cactus companion, rather than follow a clearly established narrative.

This is an emotionally serious but often humorous story about a child trying to solve an illness he cannot control. Its interest lies in Colin’s urgency, bold schemes and changing understanding of help, responsibility and loss.

No reliable judgement about its reading experience can be made yet.

A lively making-focused non-fiction book combining ten home invention projects with stories and tips about Colin Furze’s larger creations. Its appeal is likely strongest for readers who enjoy building, experimenting and humorous contraptions.

This is a gentle but emotionally direct way to talk about bereavement: grief can interfere with eating, sleeping and ordinary life, while changing in intensity rather than simply disappearing.

This is a gentle, emotionally serious story about grief. Its imaginative central image—a hare-shaped absence—gives difficult feelings a visible form, while memories and friendship bring warmth without removing the sadness.

Mog dies, watches her family mourn, and helps a new kitten settle before moving on into the sun. The story combines grief with humour and a gentle, imaginative afterlife. It offers a way to talk about remembering a pet, death, mourning and continuing family life, while still potentially feeling upsetting.

This is a direct, emotionally serious story about a child living through her mother’s death. It offers language for grief, shows that support can coexist with loneliness, and uses a familiar garment to represent continuing love and memory.

This offers a clear way into talking about death without euphemisms. The birds’ shared rituals and differing reactions may help a child recognise that grief can look and feel different.

A quiet story about losing someone important, carrying grief, and finding understanding. Bear’s friendship with the Wildcat offers companionship without demanding that he simply forget, while music and memory accompany his movement towards healing.

A public mistake changes how she sees herself, with humour and acceptance easing the pressure to perform flawlessly.

This is a playful story about turning an impossible wish into a sequence of experiments. Its appeal lies in the boy’s imaginative plans and the surprising distinction between a star in the sky and something star-shaped.

A true, illustrated account of a boy who wonders how things work, teaches himself from old science books and builds a windmill for his drought-ravaged village. The emphasis is on persistence and practical invention.

A focused, dual-narrative historical novel about displacement, survival and access to water. Its language is spare, but the experiences include war, deaths and severe deprivation, balanced by perseverance and collective problem-solving.

A gentle story about moving from a very small comfort zone into wider experiences. Mabel’s journey offers opportunities to discuss fear, curiosity, confidence, changing seasons and supporting someone who is hesitant.

A family’s fear grows as a huge black dog watches their home. Small Hope faces it, leads it on a chase, and discovers a playful way to bring it inside.

A farm hen becomes too tired to lay eggs, is taken home, and receives care while her feathers grow back. Grass, worms, bugs, puddles, friends and freedom mark her new life, followed by an unspecified joyful surprise.

A hands-on introduction to a working farm, combining a walk through farm places with brief nature facts and more than 40 flaps. It offers opportunities to notice animals, crops and everyday farm work together.

This offers a clear introduction to how milk moves from a cow and farm through processing to everyday foods. Its visual storytelling, facts and activities make the subject suitable for shared exploration.

A hands-on farm-and-tractor book for shared reading, centred on a driver’s working day. Its strongest offer is participation: children can engage with the vehicle theme while noticing jobs that help farmers.

A gentle nature story combines a small character’s change of circumstances with information about oak trees, seasons and the many species associated with them.

Choose this for a child fascinated by vehicles, farming or how machines work. It combines accessible explanations with colourful illustrations, comic characters and small visual details that invite looking closely.

A supportive, practical exploration of sadness, anger, anxiety and other feelings, linking emotions with bodily responses and coping ideas. Its illustrations, rhyme and activities invite shared reading rather than a single uninterrupted sitting.

This is a creative introduction to feelings, using alphabetic rhymes and animal imagery to give emotions memorable forms and language. It may work especially well as a shared conversation book.

This is a gentle, participatory read-aloud built around rhyme, repetition and counting. Its central pleasure is noticing both the individuality of babies and the shared features that connect them.

This is an active read-aloud: children can watch each animal, hear a movement prompt, and answer “I can do it!” before copying the action. The sequence introduces body parts and movement words through repetition and colourful collages.

Expect an art-led exploration rather than a conventional lesson: each section uses images, page alterations and brief commentary to evoke seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling, then opens towards imagination.

This is a gentle story about staying emotionally connected when physical contact is not possible. It offers several concrete, non-touching ways to show affection, while keeping the reason and duration of separation unexplained.