Preschool Book Review: I Like Myself!
🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 📚 Pre-Reading Skills — Activities that involve letters, sounds, rhymes, and print directly build the phonological awareness and letter knowledge that are the two strongest predictors of successful reading development.
- 📖 Story Structure Understanding — Understanding that stories have a beginning, problem, solution, and ending develops narrative comprehension — the mental schema children use to make sense of increasingly complex texts throughout their school years.
- 🔢 Early Numeracy — Hands-on counting, sorting, measuring, and pattern work develops the number sense and mathematical reasoning that formal arithmetic will later build on — and preschool numeracy is one of the strongest predictors of later math achievement.
- 👂 Listening & Attention — Activities that require children to listen carefully and follow directions build the voluntary auditory attention that classroom learning, reading comprehension, and conversation all require.
From the Preschool Book
"I like me on the inside, too, for all I think and say and do. Inside, outside, upside down, from head to toe and all around, I like it all! It all is me! And me is all I want to be."
About the Preschool Book
I Like Myself! Is the story of a little girl who likes herself just the way she is. She does not care what anyone else says or thinks about her because she knows how special she really is. She would like herself no matter what she looked like, even if she had beaver breath or stinky toes.
From the Reviewer
I Like Myself!Is a wonderful preschool book for teaching preschoolers about their own emotional needs. Many preschool educational programs neglect an essential part of healthy preschooler development by focusing too much on educational development and not enough on emotional development. Preschoolers are at a critical point in their emotional development. They are learning who they are and who they want to be.
I Like Myself! Encourages preschoolers to accept themselves for the person they are, no matter what. Sadly, preschoolers are often the focus of a lot of negative attention every day. Encouraging their healthy emotional development gives them an essential foundation that they will need to develop lasting self esteem and help them to get through the school years a much more secure person.
Writer Karen Beaumont and illustrator David Catrow, the same team that brought us the witty I Ain't Gonna Paint No More! (Ala Notable Children's Books. Younger Readers), teamed up again on I Like Myself! Beaumont's rhythmic chant and Catrow's colorful and entertaining illustrations are a winning combination. This is a book that preschoolers will want to read over and over again.
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Helpful Tips for Parents
- Learning environments matter. A space with accessible books, puzzles, art supplies, and natural materials at child height encourages more learning than a child-proofed empty room.
- Expose children to multiple languages early if possible. The preschool window is the most efficient period for language acquisition the brain will ever have.
- Mistakes are how children learn. A classroom and home that treat mistakes as information rather than failure produces more confident, persistent learners.
- Field trips — even to the grocery store, the post office, or the library — are powerful educational experiences. Real-world contexts anchor abstract concepts in memory.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most important educational skill to develop before kindergarten?
Executive function — the cluster of skills that includes working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control — is the strongest predictor of kindergarten and long-term academic success. Executive function is built through play (especially complex pretend play), physical activity, music, and responsive adult interaction. It cannot be taught through drills or worksheets. A child with strong executive function can learn academic content readily when developmentally ready; a child with weak executive function struggles regardless of academic knowledge.
Should my preschooler be reading before kindergarten?
Reading before kindergarten is possible for some children and developmentally not expected of most. The literacy skills that predict reading success — phonological awareness (hearing sounds in words), letter knowledge, print awareness, and vocabulary — are the appropriate focus before age 5. These skills are built through: reading aloud daily, nursery rhymes and songs, alphabet activities, and rich conversation. A preschooler who loves books, knows their letters, and has a large vocabulary is fully reading-ready, whether or not they can decode words independently.
Related reading: See also our alphabet activities and our read-aloud guide for more ideas on this topic.
