Love & Family

Books

🌿🌻Forest Mamas & Babies by Stan Tekiela
This photo-illustrated board book shares facts about forest animals native to North America, including wolves, deer, cougars, moose, bears, and porcupines. For a quick read, just learn the names for each baby animal (like kits, cubs, joeys, and porcupettes). For a longer read, you may learn about the number of babies, where they are born, how parents care for them, and how fast they grow.

🌿🌻Prairie Mamas & Babies by Stan Tekiela
This photo-illustrated board book shares facts about forest animals native to North America, including sandhill cranes, killdeer, bison, prairie dogs, badgers, & coyotes. For a quick read, just learn the names for each baby animal (like colts, pups, owlets, and calves). For a longer read, you may learn about the number of babies, where they are born, how parents care for them, and how fast they grow.

🌿🌻Lake Mamas & Babies by Stan Tekiela
This photo-illustrated board book shares facts about forest animals native to North America, including loons, bald eagles, muskrats, and toads. For a quick read, just learn the names for each baby animal (like chicks, kits, toadlets, and eaglets). For a longer read, you may learn about the number of babies, where they are born, how parents care for them, and how fast they grow.

🌿🌻Owl Babies by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Patrick Benson)
In this classic board book, three young owlets wait and wish for their mother owl to return to their nest in the tree. As they wait on a branch, they try to reassure themselves that she will be back soon!

🌿🌻Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Joose
In this story, a young Inuk girl asks her mother how far her love would go. Her mother insists that she would love her “forever and always,” even if she broke their ptarmigan eggs, threw water on their lamp, or turned into a polar bear. While primarily being a book about love and family, this book features quite a few arctic animals that are important to Inuit culture.

🌿🌻The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Clement Hurd)
In this MWB classic board book, a young bunny is feeling stifled and announces to his mother that he is going to run away. The mother bunny assures him over and over that no matter where he might run away to, she would find a way to find him. In the end he gives in and resigns himself to being her little bunny. This book alternates text pages with black-and-white illustrations with beautiful text-less full-color illustration spreads, written in a time when publishers were often reluctant to print illustrated children’s books in full color.

🌿🌻Love in the Wild by Katy Tanis
This cute board book talks about the different forms that love takes, depicting a variety of animals in unusual pairings or family groupings. All of the illustrations are full of rainbow colors, and the examples in the book are based on real-world observations of animal behavior.

🌻Just Like You by Anne Wynter (illustrated by Letitia Moreno)
With cute illustrations and great rhythm, this book embodies the “I can do it” attitude of toddlers everywhere. A child helps his family prepare for an outdoor picnic, with a few accidents along the way. I love that it portrays families as collective units with shared responsibilities (and characteristics) and shows that it’s okay for children to help imperfectly, making mistakes and messes as they learn. To catch the rhythm of this book, be sure to read the onomatopoeia along with the rest of the text.

🌻Clive and his Babies by Jessica Spanyol
Like young children everywhere, Clive and his friends play with their baby dolls. They feed them, dress them, potty train them, read to them, take them for walks, comfort them, and put them to bed– all the things they might one day do with their own children.

🌻Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers (illustrated by Marla Frazee)
With simple illustrations and excellent rhythm & rhyming, this board book shows how babies everywhere play, move, grow, and are loved and cared for.

🌻Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
In this classic children’s book, a mother sings a special lullaby to her new baby. As he grows, she continues to pick up her sleeping son and rock him throughout different challenging stages of his life until she finds she is too old and sick to continue. Her son picks her up and rocks her back and forth singing the lullaby back to her and then returns home and sings the lullaby to his brand new baby daughter, continuing the tradition. The song in this book does have an official tune, though I’m forever forgetting it. If you’ve lost a parent, this can be a difficult book to get through dry-eyed.

🌿 You and Me, Little Bear by Martin Waddel
In this story, Little Bear is feeling impatient to play with Big Bear while Big Bear is trying to finish chores. Little Bear helps Big Bear with some of the chores and then finds ways to play alone until Big Bear is ready to play together.

🌿Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Barbara Firth)
Little Bear struggles to fall asleep surrounded by dark areas and Big Bear thinks of ways to comfort him. This book explores children’s dependence on the comfort and safety offered by trusted adults, where restless children can expect comfort and patient understanding from caregivers (whose tired bedtime exasperation is also subtly acknowledged). It’s also *just* repetitive & wordy enough that it’s difficult to stay awake through the oft-requested second naptime reading when you slow the pacing a bit.

🌿 Let’s Go Home, Little Bear by Martin Waddel
In this story, Little Bear is feeling wary of suspicious sounds in the woods and Big Bear reassures him that it’s merely the sound of the snow, the wind, and the dripping ice. When Little Bear at last becomes too tired, Big Bear carries him the rest of the way home.

Plant a Kiss by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Little Miss plants a kiss in the ground, lovingly tending it. Yes, a kiss. Against all odds, the kiss sprouts into a growth of wavy, glimmering swirls. She decides to share her magical prize with others, despite her peers declarations that should keep the rarity to herself, and the kiss grows and grows, never running out. This story is a great visualization of the idea that the more love you give, the more love you have.

Hair Love by Matthew A Cherry
Zuri enjoys a wide range of different hairstyles for different days, but on the day her mother is to return home, she’s looking for an extra-special style and pulls up a video tutorial on her tablet. When the tablet crashes to the floor, her father wakes up and comes to help her. They find a tutorial the like and he helps to oil, part, and twist her hair into the perfect hairstyle for her special day. This book celebrates a variety of protective hairstyles traditionally worn by people of color, but also the engagement of a fearless Girl Dad rarely shown in books.

I Help at Home!: I Can Clean My Room, Set the Table, Fold Laundry, and More by Saniyyah Kallilallah

Lola Reads to Leo by Anna McQuinn (illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw)
In this preschool-aged book, Lola & her family prepare for the arrival of baby Leo. Lola helps baby Leo by reading books to him to sooth his frustrations during bottles, diapers, baths, and naptimes. The book also emphasizes how Lola spends her time when Leo is asleep and the ways that she helps her parents while they do dishes and laundry.

Creative Art Opportunities

❤️Paint with red, white, and pink paints
🧡Making cards or gifts for loved ones
💛 Symmetry paintings
💚Collage with heart confetti
💙Handprints and footprints/fingerpainting on cardboard

Hands On Experiences

Caring for baby dolls:
⛅️Feeding baby
⛅️Putting baby to bed
⛅️Changing baby
⛅️Bathing baby
⛅️Burping baby
⛅️Toys for baby
⛅️Singing to baby
⛅️Hugs and kisses for crying baby
⛅️Recycled cardboard: crib, bathtub, sink, potty, or playpen for dolls
🌿Taking baby for a walk with stroller or carrier
🌿Outdoor picnic with baby

Helping with family housework: (Love language: acts of service)
⛅️Dishes
⛅️Cooking
⛅️Folding Laundry
⛅️Carwash
❄️Shoveling

Songs to Learn and Sing

“Open Your Heart” – Laurie Berkner
“Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” – Lenka
“I’m Not Perfect” – Laurie Berkner
“Lucky” – Lenka
“You Are My Sunshine (v1)” – Elizabeth Mitchell
“When I’m With You” -JJ Heller
“I Can Do Things” – Stephanie Leavell
“Skinnamarink” – Sharon, Lois, & Bram
“Who’s My Pretty Baby” – Elizabeth Mitchell
“Pat-a-Cake” – Nursery Rhymes 123
“Helping Song” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“My Family” – Laurie Berkner
“Why Love a Little” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Lovebirds Love” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“Here With Me” – Frances England
“The More We Get Together” – Raffi
“Goodnight” – Laurie Berkner

“M-O-M-M-Y” (Tune: “Bingo”; also D-A-D-D-Y)
Someone loves me very much
And Mommy is her name-o
M-O-M-M-Y, M-O-M-M-Y, M-O-M-M-Y
And Mommy is her name-o…

NIYN – Love & Family on Spotify
NIYN – Love & Family on YouTube
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.