Picture Books About Teamwork, and Why My Only Child Needed Them

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My son is an only child. For the first few years it was just him at home, no brothers or sisters, and he got very good at playing alone. He also got very used to being the boss of the game. So when he started lower nursery, mixing with the other kids took him a while. He wasn’t shy exactly. He just wasn’t used to it. Doing things together was a new idea.

That is really where my search for picture books about teamwork started. Not with a reading list, but with a small boy standing at the edge of a group, working out how to join in.

Why teamwork is a hard lesson for a solo kid

When you grow up alone, you learn to solve things by yourself. That is a good skill. But it can quietly teach a child that help is not part of the plan. Mine would rather struggle with something on his own than ask, and he would rather run the game his way than share the rules.

You can’t really lecture a three-year-old out of that. I tried. It bounces right off. What I have found is that a story does the work a talking-to can’t. A child will watch a character do the thing you have been asking for, and something lands that never landed when it came from you. That is the whole reason I lean on books for the hard stuff. Sharing, patience, being brave, working together. The lesson rides in on the story.

Picture books about teamwork that aren’t mine

These are the ones I’d put in front of a preschooler first. I didn’t write any of them, and that’s rather the point of a list like this.

That Fruit Is Mine! by Anuska Allepuz

A group of elephants spends the whole book trying to reach the fruit at the top of a tree, one clever plan at a time, and getting nowhere. Meanwhile a handful of tiny mice work together and simply get it. It lands the idea without a word of moralizing, and small children find the elephants very funny.

After the Rain by Rebecca Koehn

Levi and Polly start out arguing over who gets the river. They call a truce, build a dam together, and end up with a lake they can both play in. Good for the exact moment when two kids want the same thing and neither will move.

Making a Friend by Tammi Sauer

Beaver is a builder who wants a friend. He meets Raccoon, they build a snowman together, and the friendship turns out to be the thing they actually made that day. Gentle, and the one I’d hand a child who plays alone.

Stone Soup

Travellers arrive hungry, put a stone in a pot of water, and one by one the villagers each bring something to add until there’s a meal for everybody. There are a dozen versions and most of them are good. It’s the oldest teamwork story going and it still works on a four-year-old.

Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann

Officer Buckle gives safety talks that nobody listens to. Then his police dog Gloria starts coming along, and suddenly the talks are a hit. Working out why is the whole book. Better around five than three, but worth having early.

If you only take one from this list, take That Fruit Is Mine! The elephants doing it the hard way is the clearest picture of the lesson I’ve found anywhere.

Why teamwork runs through every book in the series

Here is something I only noticed after I had written a good number of these. Every single Kitty & Dino book is a team effort. It is built into the shape of the story.

Kitty and Dino are a pair first. A red cat who can call the wind and the water, and a green dinosaur who can grow plants from bare ground. Neither one fixes anything alone. Kitty steadies the water, Dino grows a soft place to land, and it only works because they do it together. Then the animal they came to help joins in too. So by the end you have three of them, sometimes more, pulling in the same direction. The problem gets solved because nobody tried to solve it by themselves.

For a child who is used to being a team of one, that pattern, repeated gently across book after book, is worth more than any single lesson. He sees it again and again. Help is normal here. Things go better when you let someone in.

The clearest example: building something together

Carlos the Camel is the one I point to when a parent asks which book is really about teamwork. Carlos and his friends set out to build a whole library, and there is no way to do that alone. It takes every one of them, each doing the part they are good at. I wrote it partly to nudge my son toward books, and partly because I grew up in libraries myself. But the engine of the story is teamwork. A big thing, built by a group, that none of them could have built on their own.

The rest of the series works the same way, whether it is Zaggy the Zebra, Humphrey the Hedgehog, or Bently the Goat. The animal changes and the trouble changes, but the shape holds. Nobody solves it alone. Somebody always joins in.

Kitty and Dino Help Carlos the Camel. Carlos and his friends set out to build a library, and it takes every one of them. A gentle story about reading, and about what a group can build together.
See it on Amazon →

How I use these books at home

I don’t stop the story to explain the lesson. That is the fastest way to lose a preschooler. I just let the book do its thing, and then I catch the moment later, off the page. When my son and another kid are stuck over the same toy, I remind him of how Kitty and Dino only got it done together. He knows the reference. It means more to him than a rule would.

If you have an only child, or a kid who would rather do it all himself, that is who these are for. Not to fix anything overnight. Just to keep showing, in a warm and quiet way, that working together is a good thing and not a loss.

All 43 books are on Amazon, and they are free to read with Kindle Unlimited if you’re a member. Start with Carlos the Camel if teamwork is the thing on your mind right now.

Teamwork and friendship are close cousins. If your child is working on making new friends too, that is the same muscle. Taking turns is the other half of it, and that one is really patience wearing a different coat, which these books about waiting handle well. And if you want teamwork with a real deadline attached, Bently the Goat is the forest doctor whose path to his clinic gets buried by a rockslide, with sick animals waiting on the other side for medicine by sunset. Kitty and Dino cannot shift it alone either, which is rather the point. Two of ours put that teamwork to a heavier use: Slither and Bobo are both about friends helping a child reach a grandparent who is unwell, and there is a whole shelf for that if it is where you are.