Best Board Books for 1 Year Old

Why it worksCounting backwards from ten toes to one girl in bed gives the wind-down an obvious finish line, and the child can find and count the objects on each page - a job that gets quieter as the numbers get smaller. A father does the bedtime, which is still rare.

Why it worksOne rhyming couplet per animal mother and baby, all of them settling, and the metre is deliberately slow - it is almost impossible to read this book quickly, which is exactly what you need at 7pm. Ends on a human child, so the handover to sleep is explicit.

Why it worksIt is a bedtime routine in rhyme - bath, pyjamas, teeth - on a boat that tilts, and it ends with the animals exercising before bed, which is a joke a two-year-old finds hilarious and which lets you burn off the last of the wriggling.

Why it worksFourteen board pages, a clause each, covering only what a toddler will actually see happen: the scales, the light in the ears, the stethoscope, the sticker. It is the rare doctor book a not-quite-two-year-old can hold and finish before their name is called.

Worth knowingIt shows the room, not the reasons, so it answers no actual questions and a four-year-old has outgrown it.

Why it worksEvery spread is the same two beats - guess the animal from its crate, lift the flap, 'he was too big, I sent him back' - so a one-year-old learns how a book works, and a three-year-old learns adjectives: too tall, too grumpy, too scary.

Worth knowingFlaps tear. Buy the board edition if the child is under two.

Why it worksThe wrong animal is behind every flap and always says 'No!', so the toddler gets six small jokes and one payoff - and because Sally asks the question, the child answers it. The original lift-the-flap book and still the cleanest use of the mechanic.

Worth knowingVery short and squarely for under-threes; a four-year-old will be done with it.

Why it worksEach page gives the child a task with their hands - pat the fur, play peekaboo with the cloth, put a finger through mummy's ring - so it is the book that teaches a baby that books are things you do, not just look at.

Worth knowingDated in places (Daddy's scratchy face, mummy's ring) and the flimsy pages do not survive a determined toddler.

Why it worksOne texture patch per page and one sentence frame - 'That's not my dinosaur, its scales are too bumpy' - which is how a toddler picks up texture words. The mouse hides on every spread, giving them a second job once they know the words.

Worth knowingEight pages of the same sentence. Adults tire of it long before the child does.