12 Books About Opposites

I’ve  said it before. I have a slight book problem. I love books, and I love exposing my girls to many different books. One of my favorite days every week is when we get our new stack of books from the library. I could spend hours looking at books in a bookstore.

I thought I would start sharing some of our favorite books that relate to the themes we are studying, so you will see more book lists coming soon. If you find them helpful, I would love to hear from you in the comments. I would also love your book suggestions.

More Resources for Little Book Lovers

The best way to encourage a love of reading is to provide kids with many opportunities to engage with a wide variety of books that are of interest to them. That’s why we share so many books lists on Fantastic Fun and Learning. We want to make it easy for you to find great books your kids will love. Over the years we’ve also discovered some helpful tools for connecting kids and books.

Digital libraries are one very handy way to do this. Epic! is one of our favorite online libraries. It’s full of over 25,000 books, learning videos, quizzes and more for kids 12 and under…and it’s free for educators. Click here to learn more and sign up.

Book Boxes are another fun way to get kids excited about reading. What kid doesn’t love to get a special delivery in the mail?! The crew over at Bookroo finds the best little known books that you won’t already have in your library, and they send them to you each month. Take a peak inside a Bookroo Box here.

Book-Based Activities are also a lot of fun for kids. Jodie over at Growing Book by Book has saved us all a ton of time and created a full year of Book-Based Activity Calendars so that you can extend the fun with a special book each week.
We had a huge stack of books for our O is for Opposites theme. Some were from the library, and others are part of our personal collection. I have included our favorites in the list below.

Books about Opposites

Opposites by Sandra Boynton is a board book. Each of the opposite pairs are written in rhyme. This gives the book a nice rhythm, so the kids loved listening to it over and over again.

What’s Up, Duck?: A Book of Opposites by Tad Hills is another board book. This one has simple illustrations and only one word on each page. That made it easy for the kids to look at the illustrations and predict the opposites. Because of its simplicity, we also used this book to discuss the number of words and the number of letters on each page.

Black Cat, White Cat: A Pop-Up Book of Opposites by Chuck Murphy is a very well designed pop-up book. If you see it at your local library, it is definitely worth a peek. My toddler is a cat lover. She spent a lot of time looking through this book and manipulating its pages.  She especially loved that the yes and no cat could really nod its head.

Eric Carle’s Opposites is a lift the flap book. I love these, because they allow children to predict the opposite on their own without a visual cue. Both of my preschoolers loved “reading” this one on their own over and over again.

Black? White! Day? Night! – A Book of Opposites by Laura Vaccaro Seeger is another lift the flap book that allows the kids to predict the opposites. Each page also has a small window to peek through, it is very interesting to see how the illustrations are related. The rhyming pairs in this book go beyond the typical beginner pairs and include some wonderful opportunities to enrich a child’s vocabulary. Some examples are tiny/huge, lead/follow, few/many, ordinary/extraordinary, and simple/complicated.

Double Delight Opposites by Mary Novick is another book my preschoolers loved to read on their own. The Double Delight series includes two illustrations on each page.  When the page is folded open part of the original image is removed to reveal a new image that shows the opposite. This book is another one that is great for allowing kids to predict the opposite. We also have the Alphabet version in this series, and my daughter loves that one, too.

Big Is Big (and little, little): A Book of Contrasts by J. Patrick Lewis uses rhyming text to showing contrasts between various animals. My kids loved seeing the different animals in the book, and I enjoyed being able to incorporate some rhyming practice within our discussion of the book.

Big and Little by Steve Jenkins is a book that was new to me, and I am so glad I came across it. In this book each set of pages shares animals that are related to each other but differ greatly in size. The illustrations are drawn to the same scale to further illustrate the difference in size. For example, one page shows a hummingbird and an ostrich. The scientific discussion of how the animals are related provides another great learning opportunity.

Octopus Opposites by Stella Blackstone is another book that uses animals to show the opposite pairs. We liked seeing how each animal was used to show the opposites. Empty and full showed a pelican with an empty beak and a pelican with a beak full of fish. After seeing the sea urchin in, sea urchin out page, my daughter was excited to see a live sea urchin during a quick stop at the pet store. We also used this book as the inspiration for our Letter O Octopus Craft.

Wet and Dry: An Animal Opposites Book by Lisa Bullard includes many facts about animals. This book is best for preschoolers and elementary-aged kids. My preschoolers were amazed by some of the facts in the book.  We read this book when before we did our wet vs. dry activities.  Other books in this series include, Smooth and Rough, Big and Small, Fast and Slow, and Loud and Quiet.

The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood was another new-to-me book. It is more for the preschool and up crowd as it goes through all the different kinds of quiet a child might experience.  For instance, there is  lollipop quiet, sleeping sister quiet, and the quiet right before you yell, “Surprise.”  With this book we were able to make a lot of connections. My daughter instantly connected to sleeping sister quiet. We also talked about other kinds of quiet we could think of together. Older kids might be able to write about a connection they have to this book or share about another kind of quiet.

The Loud Book! by Deborah Underwood is a companion to The Quiet Book. As with the other book, we really enjoyed the illustrations. Our favorite illustration was “Fireworks Loud.” We could also make many connections to this book. “Firetruck Day at School Loud” reminded my daughter of when the firetruck came to her school.

I know there are so many other opposites books available. What are some of your favorites?

For more wonderful book lists, check out the Children’s Book Reviews from No Time for Flashcards and the book lists from What Do We Do All Day. These are two of my favorite sites for finding new books.

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