Teach your children about helpfulness with these picture books about being helpful for kids. We’ve rounded up over fifteen books on helpfulness for you to incorporate in the character training portion of your homeschool. Enjoy!
Being helpful is an important value to impart in your children. Not only will it help YOU for them to be helpful, but it will help them to learn how to be kind people who positively contribute to their society and those around them. So let’s get to the list of over fifteen pictures books about being helpful for kids.
List of Books About Being Helpful
Note: This list (with the exception of the first book) is not in any particular order, only in the order in which I added them.
This Bible story is of course available in lots of formats and depicted by lots of different authors. But I included the version by Su Box because I love her illustrations. No matter which book you choose or even if you read it directly from the Bible, the story of the Good Samaritan is a great story to read to your children about the value of being helpful, even to the most unlikely people.
Helpful Hal shows Sam and Sue the importance of helping their parents by doing chores such as hanging up clothes, washing the car, and feeding the cat. This is from a Christian perspective and includes a related Bible verse.
Little Hands Help is as much of a story for the parents as it is for children. It’s a story about a girl named Angela who loves to help. But her parents won’t let her help with the “grown up chores”. So she devises a plan to communicate with her parents how much she wants to and is capable of helping them around the house more. This is a great lesson for us parents too. It can be all too easy to “just do it ourselves” when it comes to chores that need done. But instilling a mindset of helpfulness starts from a young age and as parents we have the responsibility to nurture their hearts towards being helpers.
Brother and Sister have agreed to help their elderly neighbor, Miz McGrizz, clean her attic. Although they aren’t excited to spend their Saturday helping her out, they just might end up having more fun than they thought.
This is a sweet little My First Reader book about how Biscuit learns how to help Mrs. Gray feed the animals. From guinea pigs and fish to kittens and puppies, each animal gets their own special food. Everyone wants to play, too! But what happens when playtime gets in the way of mealtime? Biscuit will have to find a new way to make sure everyone gets what they need!
This is a small chapter book rather than a picture book, but it does include black and white illustrations throughout and not too many words on each page. It’s geared towards Kindergarten to 4th grade, but if you have a younger one that enjoys read alouds this might be a good choice. One day, when Heidi’s teacher, Mrs. Welli, teaches a lesson on the importance of helping and giving back to the community, she and her friends decide that it’s time to volunteer!
Clifford has a good heart, but whenever he tries to help others, it always seems to backfire. But in the end, he manages to be a huge helper by saving some children and helping to put out a fire.
A cute little book about a string of animals helping each other out. First a little duckling is lost and a monkey offers to help. But as the monkey is helping he starts to fall of a tree and a giraffe helps to catch him. And so on. It’s a very simple book but shows how each of us has something special about us that we can use to help others in need.
Patchwork, a colorfully quilted stuffed bear, sets forth on a quirky journey and enlists the help of his wildly eclectic bunch of buddies including a great blue whale, a mama-loving llama, and a gracious narwhal to help him repair his best pal, a raggedy bear named Fred.
One Good Deed is a book that shows how helping out one person and doing one act of kindness can impact an entire neighborhood for the better. It demonstrates how thinking about others can bring light and joy to not only one person, but a community as a whole.
This is a collection of three different Berenstain Bears stories: Kitten Rescue, A Neighbor in Need, and Little Lost Cub. All three of the stories feature themes where the bears learn to help others in need.
Daniel gets discouraged when he finds out he’s not big enough to use the tools to help dad build the playhouse. But Daniel learns that there are lots of other things that he IS big enough to help with. Because everyone is big enough to help with something.
Katerina Kittycat and Daniel are having a tea party. Daniel tries to help but Katerina doesn’t want help. In the end she learns that it’s okay to ask for and accept help and Daniel demonstrates an eagerness to help his friends when needed.
Although it has the same name as the book above, it’s a different book. In this one Daniel and his friends learn how to help each other in several different scenarios. It has some noises and sliders to help keep younger children engaged.
The classic tail of a little train helping another train that has broken down. The little blue train needs to help get all the toys and goodies over the hill for the little boys and girls on the other side. It’s a great message about helping others even when you’re small. I also think it is a good parallel to The Good Samaritan story from the Bible. Just make sure to get the original complete story, some of them are abridged.
When I was a little girl this was one of my favorite books. I’m not sure why, but it just seemed so wholesome and sweet. So when I had my own children I knew I wanted to include this precious Little Golden Book in our collection. It’s about a boy and girl named Martha and Bobby who help their mom with all sorts of chores around the house. Mind you, it’s from the 50’s. So some of the chores and pictures are outdated. But I still love it. It’s a great book to teach good work ethic.
This is the companion book to We Help Mommy. I didn’t even know it existed until after I started hunting down We Help Mommy for our own collection. And it’s just as sweet and adorable. In this one Benjy and Sue help their daddy with his chores and tasks around the house. And boy are they busy. They get quite a bit done in one day. But it’s a good example of kids helping out and doing their share within the family unit. As with We Help Mommy keep in mind that this is from the 50’s so it can be a little outdated, but still totally enjoyable and sweet to read in my opinion.
Pooh Helps Out by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld
Poor Pooh doesn’t have a thing to do until he decides to do a little something to help each of his friends, and it isn’t long before Pooh finds himself lending a paw with cleaning, dusting, putting away, and gardening.
Did I miss any books about being helpful? Be sure to comment below with your favorite books about helpfulness!