ImaginationSoup is the brainchild of Melissa Taylor, a freelance education blogger/writer with a long list of awards and credits to her name that qualify her to create the marvelous lists of books you’ll find on her mind-boggling site. 

The first thing you find on her “Best Board Books for Babies and Toddlers” site is a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle. “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” Here are the first 10 of what she recommends:

Baby Montessori Book Set 

1. Big or Small?

2. The Garden

3. Animals

4. Follow Me! 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Brown Bear, Brown Bear

You’re My Little Baby

Where is Baby’s Belly Button?

I Thought I Saw a Bear!

Goodnight Moon

The Going to Bed Book

Silly Lullaby

Little Fish and Friends

Her lists are categorized by genre, by age and by playful learning. A list of her recommended picture books cover so many topics it’s impossible to cover here; suffice it to say if you can think of a person or subject, you almost certainly will find a picture book on this list. 

Even with the richness of the ImaginationSoup site, other lists are also useful. Sometimes a simplified list could be valuable. The following was put together by Amanda Morin who styled it the “perfect summer reading list for soon-to-be first-graders.”

Henry and Mudge: The Complete Collection

Scholastic Hello Reader Series, Levels 0, 1 and 2

First Grade, Here I Come

Chrysanthemum

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Frog and Toad: Collection Box Set

The Listening Walk

Here are the first 10 books of those that We Are Teachers recommend for middle-grade readers:

A Girl, A Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

Home Sweet Motel (Welcome to Wonderland #1)

Ellie, Engineer

Trapped in a Video Game

The Season of Styx Malone

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science

The World According to Humphrey

The Pony on the Twelfth Floor

Funny Girl

Blended

The following are the first 10 of the Children’s Book Council’s highest-rated STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) books:

Buzzing with Questions: The Inquisitive Mind of Charles Henry Turner

A Computer Called Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Helped Put America on the Moon

The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons

All in a Drop: How Antony van Leeuwenhoek Discovered an Invisible World

Born Just Right

A Dream of Flight: Alberto Santos-Dumont’s Race Around the Eiffel Tower

The Electric War: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Light the World

Full of Beans: Henry Ford Grows a Car

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World

Guitar Genius: How Les Paul Engineered the Solid Body Electric Guitar and Rocked the World

Rating the Best STEM Books is a joint project of the American Society for Engineering Education, the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association, the National Science Teachers Association, the Society of Elementary Presidential Awardees, and the Children’s Book Council, an annual event since 2017. Ecclesiastes 12:12 was right: “. . .of making many books there is no end.”