Today is the 10th annual Picture Book 10 for 10! I’m honored to join everyone today in celebrating 10ish (or 20ish 🤷🏼‍♀️) of our favorite picture books.

I’m sharing my favorites that I hope will serve as windows, mirrors & sliding glass doors for kids in my kindergarten class, and for kids everywhere. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop says:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. (1990, p. ix)

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, I urge you to find out more here, as well as a video interview here.

Now, more than ever, our children deserve to feel represented in our classrooms and in the world. They deserve celebration and exploration of their identity. They deserve self-affirmation. They deserve to feel seen and be heard. They deserve to feel empowered to speak up, speak out and be agents of change. They deserve to feel like they matter.

Books can be an entry point for important conversations and connections in our classrooms and our lives. Here are a few of my must-have read-alouds in the classroom. I hope you find some that speak to you and your students. Enjoy!