Pat the Bunny
A teacher’s look at why this book belongs in the Lap Listeners stage.
Why it fits Lap Listeners (for babies in their first year, when books are about your voice, not the plot)
The original touch-and-feel book, inviting babies to pat fur, peek behind cloth, and smell flowers. It treats a book as something a baby does, not just hears. Eighty years on, it still earns its keep on the first shelf.
What makes it special
It invented the idea that a book could be a toy without stopping being a book. The illustrations are almost naive — flat, pastel, mid-century simple — which keeps all attention on the doing: patting, peeking, sniffing. Eighty years of technology later, nothing on a screen can replicate the feel of that fur.
About Dorothy Kunhardt
Dorothy Kunhardt (1901–1979) wrote Pat the Bunny, published by Simon and Schuster in 1940. Her family's archive notes she published more than forty books in three decades, and that Pat the Bunny is still in print and has sold nearly ten million copies.
She wrote it first for her youngest child, Edith, rather than for publication. Later in life she took up a second career as a scholar of Abraham Lincoln.
Also by this author: Pat the Cat · Tickle the Pig
More from “Touch, Pat, Peek”
This book is part of The Best Books for Babies: 30 Teacher Picks (Lap Listeners) in our guide The Best Children’s Books by Age — 120 books chosen by the Montessori-certified teachers at Creative Minds Montessori in Frisco, TX. Come see how we build readers →
Nobody paid for this review — not the author, not the publisher — and the store link above earns us nothing. Our only interest is the reader this book fits.