6 Easter Gift Ideas for Kids (that aren’t chocolate)

In 2023, more and more parents and grandparents are looking for Easter gift ideas for kids that are a bit different from the usual chocolate eggs and bunnies. Children do tend to be given a lot of chocolate over the Easter break and giving an Easter gift of the non-chocolate variety can be a good way of diluting the inevitable, seemingly-endless flow of chocolate …

10 Lift-the-Flap Books for 1-year-olds and Up

Lift-the-flap books can be fun for babies and young children of various ages but the age group which really, really loves these books is 1-2-year-olds. Developmentally, one-year-old and two-year-old kiddos are at the stage where they’re learning to use their bodies and delighting in all the things they can do. They absolutely love making things happen so it makes sense that using their hands …

6 Books About the Origins of Valentine’s Day for Kids

St Valentine’s Day is widely celebrated throughout England, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand but how many of us really know anything about the origins of Valentine’s Day? The books on this page tell some of these stories and provide an interesting window into the origins of Valentine’s Day. A couple of the books adopt a strongly religious perspective while …

3 Best Australia Day Picture Books

Our understanding of Australia Day and how we celebrate it has changed a great deal since I was a child. In the 1970s, 26 January was a day to celebrate the ‘founding’ of Australia – the day when the First Fleet arrived on the shores of the land they’d deemed terra nullis, literally ‘nobody’s land’. Of course it was not nobody’s land – not in 1770 when Captain Cook ‘discovered’ it and not in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived.

15 Best Australian Christmas Books for Kids

Until fairly recently, Christmas books for kids almost always depicted a northern hemisphere Christmas. While I always enjoyed these books as a child, I could never really relate to them because they didn’t at all reflect the Christmases I had living in Sydney. Thankfully, in the years since then, some really lovely picture books have emerged which depict an Australian …

Children’s Books About Managing Emotions

Today I’m sharing my 10 favourite children’s books about managing emotions. In recent times there’s been a great deal of interest in helping children learn to manage their emotions and picture books can be very helpful when it come to supporting them as they learn to understand and to regulate their big – and sometimes tricky – feelings. These are the books I use regularly …