Best Books for 3-Year-Olds

Cozying up with your three-year-old to enjoy a fun book is time well spent for many reasons. It’s a great opportunity to spend meaningful time together while broadening your child’s vocabulary. Plus, establishing a reading routine at home can help jump-start independent reading for any age group and plant the seed for a lifelong love of books. 

While you’re still the one doing the reading at this stage, you can engage your three-year-old by asking them questions about the story or by having them point to different objects on the page. Your preschooler may even be able to identify individual letters and numbers. These early pre-reading skills are a critical foundation for raising a reader and setting your child up for success at school.

The Best Preschool Book Sets

At this point in their literacy journey, your three-year-old is beginning to identify the sounds that words make (phonemic awareness) and then identifying the corresponding letters these sounds represent (phonological awareness, or phonics). A preschool set is a great activity to give them a boost in this area. 

Best-Selling Series and Beloved Characters 

When a child falls in love with a series, it encourages them to want to read regularly. Use your three-year-old’s favorite characters like Pete the Cat, Clifford, and David, to teach them valuable life lessons while building their literacy skills.     

These endearing books deliver laughs and open your child’s world to different people, perspectives, and feelings. With rhyming text, whimsical illustrations, and engaging plot, children will have fun with these read-aloud books without even realizing they’re learning!   

Picture Books About Feelings and Friendship 

Managing friendships and big feelings become a large part of your child’s world when they start preschool. Learning how to build friendships and finding common ground with others is central to honing the social-emotional skills kids need to navigate challenges and conflict later in life.

Books that teach children about the positive power of friendships help to strengthen empathy, kindness, and confidence — and will give your child a strong foundation of values to live by. 

In the hilarious How Do Dinosaurs Learn to Be Kind?, children learn that even though being kind can be difficult sometimes, with a little practice and patience, it’s always worth it in the end. The sweet story of When a Friend Needs a Friend teaches children to embrace all of their feelings and that not all feelings need to be fixed — being heard and seen is enough. 

Timeless Classics and New Favorites 

When a three-year-old discovers a picture book they love, they’ll want to read it over and over again. Re-reading the same books gives young readers a sense of control and confidence — there is comfort in knowing what’s coming next. Research has shown that there are many educational benefits to re-reading the same stories, like building fluency, so having a collection of tried-and-true classics at home can encourage more reading outside of the classroom. 

No children’s home library is complete without a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. And now, for the first time, you can get it in Eric Carle’s Very Little Library boxed set, which includes two more of his famous board books. Beginning readers love the bright illustrations and early education lessons, such as counting, days of the week, and a butterfly’s life cycle.    

With a strong message of self-acceptance, Christopher Myers’ modern classic Wings is a delightful tale that takes inspiration from a well-known myth. It’s a story about a boy named Ikarus Jackson, who shows us that our differences are what makes us special. Meanwhile, timeless stories like Say Something and Wemberly Worried appeal to kids of all ages, and even grown-ups won’t mind re-reading them over and over again!

Stay up-to-date with the best new children’s books every month to grow your home library and keep your young readers learning. Plus, explore more children’s books by age and popular read-alouds that other parents love. 

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