There are so many board books on the shelves that it can be hard to find the right ones for a baby’s first year.

Some board books offer full-length narratives (scaled down from the original picture books), others are all about detailed interaction. But for those early months, from birth to 12 months, you might want to concentrate on stimulating colours, shapes, sounds, sensory experiences and words.

Here are some great board books for early development and learning.

HIGH-CONTRAST BOARD BOOKS

High-contrast pictures, shapes and patterns help engage and stimulate a newborn baby’s vision, and assists their brain development in the early 0 – 9 months stage. Despite this being well known, it can be difficult to find good black and white or high-contrast books for babies. In fact, Tasmanian designer and illustrator Katey Love created the excellent Mesmerised range in response to this lack.

One of my all-time favourite first gifts for newborns is the extremely attractive My First Touch-and-Feel Words Book by Xavier Deneux. This is a chunky board book with delightful black, white and red illustrations of cats, dogs, bicycles, cars, shoes and socks. The page layouts are uncluttered and there are soft touch-and-feel elements to each picture. Plus, the whole package is classy enough to please even the most aesthetically fussy parent.

You can browse a collection of our recommended high-contrast board books here.

CLOTH BOOKS & BATH BOOKS

Cloth books are soft, squishy and great for ‘reading’, or more accurately, chewing and flapping about in cots, prams and baby capsules. You can’t undervalue the importance of familiarising babies with the concept of turning pages (rather than swiping or scrolling!) and looking at details on each new spread.

I’m personally a big fan of the crinkly cloth book, for the entertaining sounds they produce and the added texture. A Tiny Little Story: Park has a secret crinkly page hidden among the squishy ones, and stands out from the rest due to its gorgeous design. Baby Boo goes on a visit to the park to see the animals – snails, ducks, dogs. The pictures are bold and high-contrast, the language is simple, and the story is very relatable. Another one to check out is A Tiny Little Story: Zoo.

I also love Wee Gallery’s Tip Toe Tiger and Pitter Patter Penguin which feature bright graphics showing animals at play, and have a fantastic double-sided format – black and white on one side, and full colour with a few basic words on the other.

You can see a selection of cloth books here.

Bath books are a way to introduce books and help make bath time more fun. Check out our range of waterproof baby books here.

FAVOURITE BOARD BOOKS THAT ENGAGE BABIES

Here are the board books I inevitably find myself recommending the most when I’m on the shop floor.

Circle, Triangle, Elephant! is fun, good-looking and secretly quite educational. Colourful shapes are named and arranged in a variety of different piles, creating tongue twisters that get even sillier when other random silhouettes are introduced into the muddled mix: elephants, boats, lemons… Babies will love the bold graphics, and benefit from hearing such an enjoyable array of sounds and words, repeated many times over.

What Does Baby Want? is a hilarious circular board book that shows a baby’s face as it’s offered various round things that it might want. A tambourine, a teddy bear, a bouncy ball – none of them please our baby. Until, finally, the baby is offered two round things that it’s very interested in… This is a short, sweet and subversive book with a surprise ending. Babies and adults will love it, and it’s the perfect baby shower gift.

A flock of baby birds take joy in making raucous ‘music’ with kitchenware in the charming Bim Bam Boom. Little ears will love having the onomatopoeic words read out loud to them, and benefit from taking in a repeated array of sounds: bim bam bim, tish tish tish, boom boom boom! Eventually Mother Owl arrives to intervene, cleverly distracting the baby birds with cake. But afterwards the birds are left to their own devices once more, and the reader can’t help feeling they’re about to brew trouble once more. Frederic Stehr has injected pure joy and movement into his adorable cartoon birds.

Babies are primed to enjoy looking at faces, and this expressive board book uses photos of real babies to great effect. In Making Faces each spread shows a baby expressing one of six emotions: surprised, happy, silly, sad, sleepy, angry. Readers are invited to make the same face, and then search for the right expression in a crowd of emoting babies. And if there’s anything more interesting than another person’s face, it’s a baby’s own face, so the book finishes with a mirror.

The Alphaprints series of board books uses textured fingerprints and photo collage as part of their unique illustrative design. I particularly love Alphaprints Australian Animals for the wide array of animals – Tassie devils, yabbies, red back spiders – which are each shown in a quirky style with a short description: Koala sits in a tree / Crocodile grins happily. These larger-style board books are strong enough to take the inevitable beating that occurs when babies inevitably want to get up close with these Aussie animals.

Most babies love a good game of peekaboo and Where’s Mrs Ladybird?, Where’s Mr Lion? and Where’s Mr Owl? are full of animal peekaboo fun. The format is very straightforward – the left page has the question ‘Where is…?’ and the right page has a felt flap that reveals the animal. The illustrations are sweet, the felt flaps are much more durable than cardboard ones, and the game is fun enough to withstand repeated reads.

For an early introduction to first words, look no further than the stylish board books of Aino-Maija Metsola. If you’re wondering why My First Words, My First Colours and Shapes and My First Animals are so gorgeous, it won’t surprise you a jot to learn that Metsola is lead artist for cult Finnish brand Marimekko. Organised into themed collections (Ocean, Garden, Dinnertime, Getting Ready, Blue) with a rainbow of pictures and words on each spread, these books are fascinating for little eyes, and each one introduces 70 words.

THREE FANTASTIC BOARD BOOK SERIES

There are a number of wonderful and reliable series suitable for really young babies. Here are three that really stand out.

The That’s Not My… series follows a minimalist and effective format for each book, with the statement ‘That’s not my…’ (monkey, tractor, mermaid, bunny etc.) followed by all the reasons why: His tongue is too rough! Its tail is too fluffy! There are touch-and-feel elements on each page to add interest to the bold cartoon illustrations.

Browse the huge range of That’s Not My animals and characters available here.

The Sing Along With Me! board books are sweet and interactive (with movable parts). They’re great for grabby toddler hands, but also wonderful for singing and chanting the classics to rapt babies. Plus, all the best tunes and rhymes are available: The Wheels on the Bus, Incy Wincy Spider, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, If You’re Happy and You Know It and many more.

If you’re not feeling confident about your vocal stylings, you can even scan the QR code on the first page for both instrumental and vocal audio versions.

View the full range here.

The Listen To The series are some of the sweetest and most foolproof noise books out there. Each of the six pages introduces a new animal, character, scene or object, and invites the reader to press a button and add noise: nightingales singing, kittens meowing, salsa playing, and so on. The sounds produced are top notch, the illustrations cute, the construction is very sturdy, the books are small enough to slip into a handbag and, most importantly for parents, there is an OFF switch at the back so you can choose to take a break from the noise. But honestly, you might not need it.

View the full range here.

Leanne Hall