5 Books For Kids Who Love Collecting Things

If You Find a Rock, by Peggy Christian, photographs by Barbara Hirsch Lember
If there’s one thing that elevates outdoor family adventures for my kids, it’s the opportunity to collect something. We return to this delightful book every summer, and some of its terms, like a “wishing rock”—a rock with a stripe around it—are now household vocabulary. This collection of softened photographs and poetic descriptions will leave adults nostalgic for the dirty fingernails and lazy days of childhood and inspire children to look at something as simple as a rock in a new way.

The Word Collector, by Peter H. Reynolds
Peter Reynolds has a special knack for capturing universal, but infrequently articulated, experiences of childhood. Other children collect things, like stamps, bugs and comic books, but Jerome prefers to collect words. He records words he loves on scraps of paper and fastidiously categorizes them in scrapbooks. When his stack of notebooks slips one day and his collection goes flying, his face reflects his desperate distress. What happens next, though, is an amazing example of the power of sharing one’s collection among friends.

The Button Box, by Margarette S. Reid, illustrated by Sarah Chamberlain
Many kids are avid collectors, but do you know who else loves to squirrel things away? Grandmothers, that’s who. The grandmother in this story has an amazing collection of buttons that her grandson loves to explore when he visits. This simple but timeless story has never failed to captivate children with whom I’ve shared it. Read it with your kids, and then find a pile of buttons to sort through and marvel at together.

Hannah’s Collections, by Marthe Jocelyn
Hannah doesn’t just have one collection, she has many: buttons, popsicle sticks, feathers, shells, rings, and more. When her teacher asks students to bring a collection into school to share, she isn’t sure how to choose. Her eventual solution is a good one though, and may motivate similar real-life collectors of everything to think outside the box (or bag, or jar) about how they might creatively turn their treasures into something new.

The Amazing Collection of Joey Cornell: Based on the Childhood of a Great American Artist, by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Gerard Dubois
The idea of a childhood passion turning into a lifelong career pursuit is always an intriguing one for children to imagine. 20th century artist Joseph Cornell’s habit of collecting things—“If I like it, I keep it,” he always said—evolved over time from a childhood pastime to artistic inspiration. One of the most delightful aspects of a collection is its ability of its contents to remind owners of stories, memories and emotions. Sometimes, as Joseph Cornell aptly observed, children are able to appreciate this most of all.