The Best Word Play Books for Kids

Whoever reads this aloud is contractually obliged to say every ridiculous word printed on the page.

Every corner of one ordinary house turns out to hide an invented creature whose name rhymes with wherever it lives.

Five words rearrange themselves across the pages until the fruit and the bear keep trading shapes and colors.

The rhymes start out easy, then stack up into traps set for whoever is reading aloud.

Pairs of words that sound identical sit side by side, one of them with a texture waiting under a finger.

Remove one letter from a word and the beast becomes best, the bride becomes a ride, the chair becomes hair.

A dinosaur's love for words leads to an unexpected friendship and a surprising discovery.

A pile of forgotten alphabet blocks gets rearranged into a castle, a dungeon, and a dragon that needs handling.

Each poem tells a familiar fairy tale, then reverses line by line to tell it from the opposite side.

Poems, footnotes, and mysteriously misnumbered pages conspire in a running feud between a writer and his illustrator.

Each animal’s name gets a single sound swapped, and the new word describes exactly the mischief underway.

A fifth-grader makes up a word for a pen as a prank, and then cannot stop it from spreading.

A bored boy drives a toy car through a tollbooth into a country where idioms come true and words are sold at market.