Tana Hoban
Recognized in the Creative Minds Montessori 2026 Teacher’s Choice list.
Tana Hoban is one of roughly one hundred authors whose work was selected by the Montessori-certified teachers at Creative Minds Montessori for the 2026 Teacher’s Choice list — 120 books chosen across four reading stages, from first lap-reads to first chapter books. Their 2 selected books were chosen for how precisely they meet children at a real developmental moment. This recognition cannot be bought: no author or publisher paid to appear on our lists, and we take no commission on any book sale.
About Tana Hoban
Tana Hoban (1917-2006) was an American photographer who built a career in commercial photography, specializing in pictures of children, and taught photography at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1969. Beginning in 1970, when she was 53, she wrote, designed and photographed more than 110 books for children, many of them wordless, using photographs to teach shapes, colors, numbers and opposites.
Hoban traced her start to a Bank Street School project in which children asked what they had noticed on the way to school could remember nothing, until they were handed cameras and began paying attention. The question she then asked herself was: 'What is there, right there where I'm standing that I'm not seeing?'
Also by this author: Black on White · Of Colors and Things · Shapes, Shapes, Shapes
Publisher page: www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/tana-hoban-880000029645
Selected for the 2026 Teacher’s Choice list
Part of The Best Children’s Books by Age, chosen by the teachers at Creative Minds Montessori in Frisco, TX.