Our second list of picture books full of prepositions making them a great resource in any Early Years classroom when teaching spatial concepts.
I know! The sequel is not always as good as the original but my post last year about using picture books for teaching prepositions has been steadily viewed since I first hit publish meaning plenty of you are still looking for great picture books to use while teaching prepositions. And given the number of other great choices out there, I thought I'd share some more favourites - some old, some new. Looking for more ideas for introducing prepositions to you class? You might find our teaching prepositions post useful.
This post contains affiliate links.
The Bouncing Ball
is a new to me book having only been published last year in Australia. It's bold, bright illustrations by Georgia Perry make this book immediately engaging. While the text, by Deborah Kelly, is beautifully simple as we are told the story of the bouncing ball. It starts out in the hands of a small boy who found the ball, picked it up, bounced it, turned it over and bounced it again. 
He plays with it some more - against a wall, high in the air, all the way down the street until he drops it! It bounces onto the road between two cars, into a gutter, down a storm drain, into the ocean and out to sea. Never to be seen again... at least not by the small boy.
Instead we get to follow the ball on part of it's journey through the remainder of the book. It's great read aloud book and a good one if you're working on predicting in terms of reading comprehension strategies with a repetitive pattern running through the book.
Up and Down is another new book which follows a penguin (who doesn't love penguins) on a journey to visit his friend. He leaps off his iceberg and makes its way through lots of opposing prepositions. Lots of opposites - high and low, over and under, are included but in each spread, a flap covers the opposite making it the perfect hands-on book for young readers. Britta Teckentrup's artwork is superb.
Rosie's Walk is not new but when it comes to teaching prepositions to young children, it is still the perfect book. The classic by Pat Hutchins is wonderfully illustrated in Autumn hues. It's text is simple but always guaranteed a laugh when read aloud and after the first few pages, children can try to predict what will happen to the fox as it follows Rosie around the farm.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
It's worth mentioning again here the free printables over at Early Learning HQ. I first mentioned them in a post I written about birds. You can read that by clicking here. I particularly like their sequencing cards for retelling.
Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale is one of our most favourite Mo Willems books along with the Pigeon ones. We are introduced to a little girl called Trixie and her parents and her most favourite, one-of-a-kind Knuffle Bunny. While not as rich in prepositions as some I've mentioned, it is still worthy of inclusion here I feel. Trixie and her Dad set off one day to do the washing at a local laundromat and we follow them down the street, through the park, past the school and into the laundromat. All is well until on their return journey, Trixie realises something. Knuffle Bunny is nowhere to be seen!!! She tries and tries to tell her dad but without success.
Needless to say, it is delightfully done. The hand-drawn images overlaid the black and white real-world photos (the 'where' appears in the end of the book) work so well. The humor shines throughout and my kids have loved reading this (and Knuffle Bunny Too and Knuffle Bunny Free) since we bought it.
I had included another of Laura Ljungkvist book in my last post about prepositions but I have to mention her book Follow the Line to School
here. Once again she invites the reader to follow the line through each page (great for hand-eye co-ordination) but this time it's all familiar territory as the setting is a school. This one does use less prepositional language than Follow the Line and is better read one-to-one for this reason to allow you to talk about the text. At preschool recently we used this book as a prompt then invited the children to follow the line after having followed the line through each class and around the different objects.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the app Book Creator for iPad here.
