books about friendship, 3.5 year old

[laughingbear]

My dd is an only child who has recently started at nursery. She has one good friendship, which I'm pleased about, but it's quite intense, and she often tries to hold anyone who wants to join in fiercely at bay. Can anyone recommend books about sharing, in the context of friendship? And good books about friendship generally? She has a decent attention span, so slightly longer books ok too. Thank you!

Room on the Broom is quite good for sharing/helping/making friends I think. Although as it's a witch and some animals it might be a bit abstract.

Maybe some school themed books like 'Starting School'.

Shirley Hughes books cover kindness/sharing/helping etc.

You could make up a story to tell her that is identical to her situation, but with the names changed. My DC always enjoy/respond well to those.

Better than reading about it though would be role playing. Either with small world stuff like Happyland/Sylvanian Families/Lego or with dolls/puppets/teddies.

Great ideas, thank you. Especially the role playing - that hadn't actually occurred to me. Am more likely to baldly explain things, which doesn't work so well.

I role play quite a bit with his playmobil school! I've learned quite a bit this way. Like the helper with the 'angry mouth' :-(

Stupid question, but how exactly do you do it? Assign characters to each figure then say let's pretend we're at nursery ... Or whatever?

I had a similar situation with my DD when she was in reception so a year or so older than your DD, but I bought a book from Amazon called How to be a Friend and was really good.

Not all of it applied to the specific problem we had at the time, but may do in the future so it's a good one for the bookshelf.

You can probably be a bit more loose/vague than that. Get a game going with two figures (they don't need assigned characters unless she wants to do that) and then get a third one and say 'oh can I join in?' and see what she says. If she says 'no', then have your character say 'yes he can join in, we can do xyz if we have three people playing' or 'it's fun to have lots of friends'. If she says 'yes' then have the third character say 'thanks, that's really kind' or anything along those lines. Or you could have a figure who is crying because they don't have anyone to play with and encourage her, or do it yourself if she won't, to have another figure invite that one to play. Or have a tea party with a group of teddies/dollies and talk about how fun it is when we do things with lots of friends. Anything really, just reinforce that it's ok to play with more than one person at a time and it's ok to share friends with other people.

Thank you!

Katie Morag? New series coming up too I gather.

Victoria Turnbull's 'Sea Tiger' could be useful, it's shortlisted for the Waterstones' Children's Illustrated Book Prize 2015, the theme is about friendship and extending friendship circles. Please see review at www.hatpeopleofhatland.com.