The 15 Best Books For 5 Year Olds (2023 Buying Guide)

Updated 30th December 2021.

At five years old children are at school and actively learning to read. At home, some more advanced readers will want time on their own to explore the joy of reading for themselves. But all children will still want to be read to, especially at bedtime.

This is a rewarding age to be reading with children. Stories get more complicated, exploring  more than one issue, and characters become more three dimensional (perhaps displaying diverse motives). Books might even create secondary storylines and head off in tangents. Text gets a little more sense and takes more focus from readers and listeners. There’ll still be a picture to enjoy on every page, though.

Books for five-year-olds are often full of memorable characters (animal, alien or human!) and offbeat humour. That’s great, because we know that humour can help instil a love of reading and aid comprehension skills.

What to consider when buying books for 5 year olds

Don’t go for the safe option and buy or borrow books which are too young for your child, because they may start to find those simple problem-and-answer stories a bit boring. Remember, many children at five have a vocabulary of over 2,000 words, so it’s OK to stretch them a little.

The 15 best books for 5 year olds

Cheeky Sid can eat six dinners a day, as long as his six ‘owners’ never find out about each other.

A family prepares a surprise birthday party and waits patiently (or not) for the birthday boy to return.

Leonard is a lion whose best friend is a duck. That can’t be right…

Magician Monsieur Lapin has a very clever rabbit assistant - until one night…

A great escape story...from the frying pan.

Little Red Riding Hood for a kinder age. Red heads off into the woods, but wolves are nowhere to be seen.

Does anyone love honey enough to dress up in a bumble bee onesie!

Bear has lost his hat, but not all is what it seems.

Handa sets out from her village to bring a gift to her friend.

Naughty Nibbles is munching his way through famous fairytales. Can you stop him?

   11.    Rhinos Don’t Eat Pancakes

Nobody listens to Daisy, so when a big purple rhino takes a chomp of her pancake, who’s going to believe her?

A book about making the best thing ever, even when it’s harder than you thought.

   13.    The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes 

We all make mistakes, right? Not Beatrice Bottomwell, never ever ever.

One day a Black Dog appears outside the Hope family home…

The Tear Thief catches children’s tears as they fall. But what does he do with them?

How to read to a 5 year old

Many children will be reading on their own at this age, but keep reading to them as well. You can help their understanding of language by pointing out linguistic features in the text, like rhymes, repetition and onomatopoeia.