15 Best Books for Kindergarteners That Are Actually Funny
By Jimmy Vee
Book Reviews By The Book Explorer Jimmy Vee
and his bookworm buddy, Readit
Kindergarten is a funny reading year.
Some kids are sounding out their first words.
Some are memorizing favorite books and reading them back to you.
Some can handle an early reader.
Some would rather study the pictures and tell you everything you're missing.
And nearly all of them can listen to a story far harder than anything they could read alone.
So I didn't build this list by asking whether a kindergartener can read every word.
Wrong question.
I looked for books that make kindergarteners want to be part of the reading.
Books they can shout at.
Books with pictures they can investigate.
Books with rhymes they start finishing before you do.
Books about school, friendship, terrible decisions, hungry dragons, stubborn pigeons, and one doughnut who discovers something troubling about breakfast.
If you're new to Book Explorers, I'm Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, children's author, dad, and longtime performer for kids. Readit the Book Worm is my childlike sidekick, and we've been through a lot of books looking for the ones that make reading feel like something kids get to do rather than something they're supposed to do.
Every book here has a full review on this site, which is a first for one of our lists. The Belly Laugh Scale number beside each one comes straight off that review page. The order is about what a book gives a kindergartener, not how funny I found it, so a three can sit above a five.
Quick Picks
- Best for shouting at a character: Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
- Best for making the grown-up suffer: The Book With No Pictures
- Best absurd cause and effect: Dragons Love Tacos
- Best page-turning game: The Monster at the End of This Book
- Best rhyme and repetition: The Wonky Donkey
- Best first week of school: We Don't Eat Our Classmates
- Best alphabet play: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
- Best for prediction: The Gruffalo
- Best picture-led story: No, David!
- Best chain reaction: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
- Best for kids who inspect everything: Arnie, the Doughnut
- Best sing-along: Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes
- Best classroom disaster: Too Much Glue
- Best first taste of independence: Today I Will Fly!
- Best beginning-reader comedy: The Cookie Fiasco
1. Best for Shouting at a Character: Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
By Mo Willems
The bus driver has one request.
Don't let the pigeon drive the bus.
Then he leaves.
Now you're in charge.
This is one of my favorite kindergarten setups, because Willems doesn't ask kids to sit quietly outside the story. He gives them a job.
The Pigeon begs. He bargains. He complains. He tries every angle he has.
Kindergarteners get to shut him down.
Again.
And louder.
That isn't a distraction from the book. That's the book.
The simple art also makes the Pigeon's moods ridiculously easy to read. Nobody needs to explain when he's losing it.
Look at him.
He's losing it.
Belly Laugh Scale: 5/5, Laugh-Out-Loud Legend
2. Best for Making the Grown-Up Suffer: The Book With No Pictures
By B.J. Novak
There are no pictures.
Not one.
The rule is that whoever is reading has to say whatever the words tell them to say.
Terrible arrangement for the adult.
Which is exactly why it works.
Suddenly the person who normally runs story time is making ridiculous noises and saying things no dignified adult intended to say that morning.
Kindergarteners understand that power shift instantly.
I especially like it for a kid who assumes a book without pictures couldn't possibly be for them.
Give it a minute.
Belly Laugh Scale: 5/5, Laugh-Out-Loud Legend
3. Best Absurd Cause and Effect: Dragons Love Tacos
By Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri
Dragons love tacos.
They do not love spicy salsa.
Seems manageable.
It is not.
Rubin hands kids one very important rule and then lets them wait for somebody to blow it. Salmieri fills the party with goofy dragons who look entirely at home eating tacos right up until dinner goes wrong.
Kindergarteners can follow this cause and effect without any help.
Tacos? Good.
Spicy salsa? Bad.
Dragons full of spicy salsa? Check your homeowner's insurance.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
4. Best Page-Turning Game: The Monster at the End of This Book
By Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael Smollin
Grover has discovered something horrible.
There is a monster at the end of the book.
His solution is simple.
Stop turning pages.
Naturally, children respond by turning every page.
He ties things down. He builds barriers. He begs. None of it works, because the kid holding the book has all the power.
That's why it has lasted. The physical act of turning a page becomes the joke, and kindergarteners get to cause the trouble themselves.
Readit notes that Grover could solve this whole thing by leaving the book.
Nobody asked Readit.
Belly Laugh Scale: 5/5, Laugh-Out-Loud Legend
5. Best Rhyme and Repetition: The Wonky Donkey
By Craig Smith, illustrated by Katz Cowley
Every time we learn something new about this donkey, his description gets longer.
And then longer.
And then somebody has to say the whole ridiculous thing again.
Smith built it as a song first, and you can feel it. Kids hear the pattern, anticipate the rhymes, and know precisely where the hee-haw goes.
Meanwhile Katz Cowley's donkey looks entirely too pleased with himself.
Here's the thing that makes it work in a classroom: it gets harder for the adult at exactly the rate it gets easier for the kids. By the last page they're carrying it and you're the one tripping.
That's a good trade.
Belly Laugh Scale: 5/5, Laugh-Out-Loud Legend
6. Best First Week of School: We Don't Eat Our Classmates
By Ryan T. Higgins
Penelope Rex is starting school.
Unfortunately her classmates are children.
And children are delicious.
Inconvenient.
Higgins takes a very recognizable kindergarten problem, learning how to treat the other kids, and gives it a dinosaur-sized twist.
It lands because Penelope eventually experiences the problem from the other side.
Literally.
Funny enough to earn its spot, and there's plenty here for a conversation about how it feels to be on the receiving end, without turning story time into a lecture.
Belly Laugh Scale: 5/5, Laugh-Out-Loud Legend
7. Best Alphabet Play: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
By Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault, illustrated by Lois Ehlert
The lowercase letters race up a coconut tree.
This goes about as well as you'd expect.
The alphabet isn't sitting in neat rows waiting for somebody to point at flash cards. These letters are climbing, crashing and causing trouble.
Much more interesting.
The rhythm is the star. After a couple of trips through, kids know what's coming and jump into the repeated language. Lois Ehlert's bold shapes stay readable from across a classroom.
It's the lowest-scoring book on this list and it's still at number seven, which tells you something about how this list is ordered. The Belly Laugh Scale measures funny. This book's job is rhythm and letters, and it does that job better than almost anything.
Belly Laugh Scale: 3/5, Solid Chuckles
8. Best for Prediction: The Gruffalo
By Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler
A little mouse walks through the woods and keeps meeting animals who would very much like to eat him.
So Mouse invents the Gruffalo.
Excellent plan.
One problem.
The Gruffalo turns out to be real.
Donaldson's rhyme makes this wonderful aloud, but I like the thinking underneath. Mouse survives by paying attention and staying one step ahead of everybody bigger than he is.
Kindergarteners can enjoy the monster, enjoy the rhyme, and work out what Mouse is doing before some of the animals do.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
9. Best Picture-Led Story: No, David!
By David Shannon
David is having a day.
A very David day.
The words are simple. The pictures are doing nearly all the work.
Which makes it especially useful in kindergarten, because a kid who isn't independently reading much yet can still tell you exactly what's happening.
And they will.
Probably in detail.
Shannon understands that children enjoy watching somebody else break the rules, particularly from the safe side of the book. The ending gives all that chaos somewhere warm to land.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
10. Best Chain Reaction: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
By Laura Numeroff, illustrated by Felicia Bond
Give the mouse a cookie.
Now he needs milk.
And once that starts, good luck.
Every request causes another, which causes another, until you've been dragged through an entire day by one very demanding mouse.
Kindergarteners start anticipating what's coming, and the circular ending makes rereading genuinely satisfying rather than just repetitive.
If a mouse asks me for a cookie after this book, I'm pretending I'm not home.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
11. Best for Kids Who Inspect Everything: Arnie, the Doughnut
By Laurie Keller
Arnie is delighted when somebody buys him from the bakery.
Then he learns what people do with doughnuts.
Upsetting news.
Keller packs the pages with side jokes, little comments, signs, background characters and business happening away from the main story.
Which makes Arnie different from most of this list.
You don't just listen. You investigate.
I wouldn't rush this one. Let them interrupt when they find something. There's a lot of doughnut business going on.
This is the one I'd use with a small group rather than the whole rug. The others work at a distance. Arnie works when kids are close enough to point.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
12. Best Sing-Along: Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes
By Eric Litwin, illustrated by James Dean
Pete has brand-new white shoes.
Then he steps in things.
The shoes change color.
Pete keeps going.
That's the rhythm of the whole book and kindergarteners catch it fast. The repeating pattern makes it easy to join in even when a child isn't reading the text. They predict, they answer, they sing, they follow Pete through one footwear disaster after another.
There's a decent attitude hiding in there too.
Stuff happens.
Keep walking.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
13. Best Classroom Disaster: Too Much Glue
By Jason Lefebvre, illustrated by Zac Retz
Matty loves glue.
His teacher would prefer he love slightly less glue.
Matty disagrees.
Soon we're well past arts and crafts and into a full glue emergency.
It earns its kindergarten spot because the setting is completely familiar while the situation goes entirely off the rails.
Classroom supplies? Normal.
Kid ignoring instructions? Also normal.
Kid becoming part of the art project? Now we're reading.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
14. Best First Taste of Independence: Today I Will Fly!
By Mo Willems
Piggie has decided she is going to fly.
Gerald knows pigs cannot fly.
Piggie does not find Gerald's information helpful.
This is where the list shifts from books an adult performs to books a kindergartener can start taking over.
Willems uses speech bubbles, expressive characters, a lot of white space and a conversation kids can follow visually.
The joke is still there.
But now the child may be doing some of the reading.
That's a big deal, and it's worth making a fuss about when it happens.
Belly Laugh Scale: 4/5, Big-Time Belly Laughs
15. Best Beginning-Reader Comedy: The Cookie Fiasco
By Dan Santat
Four friends.
Three cookies.
We have a problem.
A serious one, if you're one of the four friends.
Santat turns sharing into a comedy of panic while the cookies keep getting broken into smaller pieces.
I like it at the end of this list because it shows where kindergarten reading is heading. The pictures carry plenty of information. The characters are expressive. The situation needs no explaining. And the math sneaks in because somebody has to solve the cookie problem.
Nobody came here for a worksheet.
We came for cookies.
The fractions followed us in.
Belly Laugh Scale: 3/5, Solid Chuckles
How I Chose These
I wasn't looking for fifteen books with a giant K printed on a reading-level chart.
Kindergarten doesn't work that way. A child can decode one book independently and happily listen to another far beyond it.
So I looked for different ways in.
Some let kids participate: Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, The Monster at the End of This Book.
Some let them hear and predict language: The Wonky Donkey, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, The Gruffalo.
Some make them read pictures: No, David!, Arnie, the Doughnut.
Some give them recognizable school and social situations: We Don't Eat Our Classmates, Too Much Glue.
And a couple start handing the reading over: Today I Will Fly!, The Cookie Fiasco.
The common ingredient is that none of them treats reading like medicine.
Should Kindergarteners Be Reading by Themselves?
Some will. Some won't.
Some will recognize sight words, decode simple sentences and proudly finish an early reader.
Others will read a favorite picture book from memory, using the illustrations to tell the story.
That is reading development too.
I wouldn't use this list as a test. The point isn't working through fifteen books until a five-year-old has proven something.
Keep reading aloud.
Let them finish the rhyme.
Let them yell at the Pigeon.
Let them study David's latest bad decision.
Let them read Piggie's speech bubble if they can.
Let them listen if they can't.
Reading together and reading alone are not competitors. There's room for both, and this list deliberately holds both.
What Makes a Great Kindergarten Read-Aloud?
Here's the performer's answer.
Give the kids something to do.
It doesn't have to mean jumping around the room.
Sometimes the job is predicting. Sometimes it's repeating a line. Sometimes it's spotting the joke in the picture. Sometimes it's knowing something the character doesn't. Sometimes it's just waiting for the disaster you can see coming.
That's why so many books here run on repetition, visual jokes, strong page turns, rhyme, or a character making a decision you'd never make.
A room of kindergarteners will tell you very quickly when you've lost them.
The good books hand you ways to bring them in.
If you're specifically planning a classroom read-aloud rather than shopping for one kid, I sorted that shelf separately: funny kindergarten read-alouds ranks the same territory by whether a book can hold a whole room. And if you'd rather shop by age than by grade, there's a five-year-old list that leans further toward one child on a couch.
Picture Books or Early Readers?
Both.
Please don't pack away the picture books because a child has started reading.
Picture books carry vocabulary, humor, visual information and ideas well beyond what a beginning reader can decode alone.
At the same time, there's something genuine about the first book a kid looks at and thinks:
Wait. I can read this.
Which is why a couple of early-reader bridges are on the list.
An adult can perform The Book With No Pictures on Monday.
A child can start taking Piggie's part on Tuesday.
Nobody has been promoted out of picture books. We just added another way to read.
One From My Own Shelf
Most of what's on this list works because the kid gets to know something, say something, or spot something.
That's the whole engine behind Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book. Dangerous Dave insists he has removed every last dinosaur. The pictures disagree with him on every page, and the kids get to say so.
Out loud.
Repeatedly.
It's aimed at ages 4 to 8, which lands right on this shelf, and it does the same job as the Pigeon: it hands a kindergartener a reason to talk back to a book.
Jungle Jimmy's Final Picks
If I were standing in front of a kindergarten class and could grab one book for maximum participation, I'd take Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Kids understand their job immediately.
If I wanted the grown-up to become the entertainment, The Book With No Pictures.
For rhyme and repetition, The Wonky Donkey is near the top of my pile.
For a beginning reader ready to own some of it, Today I Will Fly!
And if somebody told me the class was particularly interested in tacos and dragons?
That's an oddly specific request.
But we're prepared.
The bigger goal is simpler than any of this.
Find the book that gets the kid leaning toward the page.
Start there.
Keep exploring, Story Seekers!
Jungle Jimmy & Readit