Explore booklists assembled by children’s literature experts. If you find books you like, check our catalog to see if they’re available at Erikson. If we don’t have something you need, request it via Interlibrary Loan or talk to a librarian to request a purchase.
Children’s Picture Book Database at Miami University – Index to a bibliography with abstracts of over 5000 picture books for children from preschool to third grade.
Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature – Searchable database with over 10,000 records from 125 awards across six English-speaking countries. You can limit your search by ethnicity/nationality of the protagonist, language, age of the reader, and more.
Cooperative Children’s Book Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison – The CCBC features up-to-date lists of award-winning and “best of” titles as well as topical children’s book lists covering subjects such as labor, grief and loss, seasons, and civic engagement.
Latinas for Latino Lit (L4LL) – L4LL is a literacy organization that highlights Latino authors and illustrators and offers an online summer reading program.
International Children’s Digital Library – ICDL boasts a vast collection of digitized children’s books in a number of different languages that can be searched by age range, length, topic, language, and even the color of the cover.
Kids Like Us – Kids Like Us is a non-profit organization “dedicated to the literacy learning of children in city schools.” To this end, they feature book lists that allow you to search according to the race of the characters, book genre, themes, and gender of the characters. They also offer recommended book sets for purchase from authors such as Nina Crews and for topics such as “primary urban fiction.”
De Colores: The Raza Experience in Books for Children – “De Colores reviews and critiques children and young adult books about Raza peoples throughout the Diaspora.” They also include a helpful guide for evaluating children’s books for honest portrayals of Raza peoples.
The Brown Bookshelf – The Brown Bookshelf is “a group of authors and illustrators who have come together to push awareness of the myriad of African American voices writing for young children.” Their flagship initiative is 28 Days Later, a month-long showcase of the best in Picture Books, Middle Grade, and Young Adult novels written and illustrated by Black creators.
American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL) – “Established in 2006, American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL) provides critical perspectives and analysis of indigenous peoples in children’s and young adult books, the school curriculum, popular culture, and society”
Little Parachutes – Little Parachutes is a collection of “situation books” — which are “picture books that help children deal with life’s challenges.” Topics they cover include divorce, serious illness in the family, anxiety, moving, eating healthily, and others.
Juvenile Series and Sequels – Created and kept up-to-date by the Mid-Continent Public Library in Kansas City, Mo., this database contains over 36,000 books in 4,900 series titles that are classified into three reading audiences: birth through 2nd grade, 2nd through 6th grade, and 6th through 12th grade. Users can also browse books by book title, author, series title, and subject.
Diverse BookFinder – is a collection of more than 2,000 children’s picture books featuring people of color and indigenous people (IPOC). We’ve reviewed and catalogued children’s trade picture books fitting this criteria, published since 2002. Diverse BookFinder is not a list of recommended titles. Their intention is to collect every book published or reprinted since 2002, not just the “good” ones. In this way we’re able to provide data insight and add to the children’s literature and diversity discussions in a way never done before.
To find this book, you’ll go juvenile collection and find the bin labeled, “Animal Story." See photo below of this bin. Some categories only have one bin, and some have many, so keep that in mind as you search for your book.
