The Best Water Books for Kids

A girl finds water everywhere she looks — in the pond, the puddle, the fog, the teakettle, and her own tears.

A rhyming year of water changing form: rain to puddle, puddle to steam, steam to cloud, cloud to snow.

One muddy puddle at the edge of a field, and a year of animals that come to drink, bathe, hunt, and hatch in it.

A mother and child paddle across a mountain pond while its busier half goes on out of sight beneath the canoe.

Ms. Frizzle shrinks the class into raindrops so they can fall, run downhill, and come home through the town’s pipes.

A grandmother answers a child’s question with maps, myths, glaciers, floods, and rivers from every continent.

Ten habitats, ten sets of animals, and one water hole shrinking on every page until it is gone.

A girl describes water as her first medicine, then stands up when a “black snake” threatens the river.

Gie Gie walks miles with her mother for a pot of muddy water and dreams of the day it will run clear near home.

Every ocean, cloud, aquifer, and glass of water on Earth treated as one shared well that nobody refills.

Twenty-five real lakes that mummify birds, boil, explode, swallow ships, or get struck by lightning all night.

Two Sudanese children, twenty-three years apart: one walking hours a day for water, one walking to stay alive.