Books

Ellen Mayer Books

Coming Soon . . .


Yellow, Red, Green – GO!

By Ellen Mayer
Illustrated by Ying-Hwa Hu
Star Bright Books
Spring, 2024


TBA

Gift & Box

Follow the adventures of Gift and Box as they travel from Grandma’s house to Sofia’s front door!

Click on the cover to learn more.

Leaves to My Knees

Leaves to My Knees is a lively seasonal read-aloud and a warm family story that’s also a playful introduction to the early math concepts of size comparison and measurement.

Click on the cover to learn more.

Small Talk Books® Collection

Small Talk Books® are playful stories celebrating diversity while featuring children and adults talking and having fun together. These picture books also show families, caregivers and teachers how to build young children’s language through conversation during everyday small moments together. Frequent small talks add up to big learning gains for babies, toddlers and preschoolers! Each of the books in the series comes with a supporting note from a leading early childhood education expert.

“Author Ellen Mayer . . . has penned four smart picturebooks to facilitate meaningful parent-child interactions. . . . [The] mixture of read-aloud, talk modeling for parents, and information from [Dr. Betty] Bardige make Mayer’s books delightful, instructive little packages.”

– Jarrett Dapier, “Building Better Brains,” in Children and Libraries, journal of the Association for Library Service to Children

“I love Small Talk Books® because they model ways for caregivers to engage children in conversations that promote language and cognitive development.”

“Small Talk Books® provide caregivers with practical, accessible and fun tools to help promote the types of talk that are most beneficial for young children’s language development. The books do a great job of translating research into practice – through engaging text and pictures, they take what we know from research and translate this into concrete examples of high-quality conversations between caregivers and young children.”

– Professor Meredith L. Rowe, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“[Small Talk Books®] are great books for babies that encourage all kinds of early conceptual understanding.” 

– Mary Hynes-Berry and Cody Meirick, Erikson Institute

“As an early childhood educator and a parent I am excited about Small Talk Books®. Not only do the children in my childcare love all four books, but the books provide modeling within the stories and useful information on building language skills in young children for both the parents of the children in my childcare and myself! The series is appropriate for children across a range of ages – I serve children from 3 months to 5 years and there is a book for everyone.”

– Andy Lesser-Gonzalez, Owner & Lead Teacher at Panda’s Playcare Family Childcare in Roslindale, MA

Small Talk Books® with early math

These books in the Small Talk Books® collection are also full of math talk. In these stories, playful conversations with an adult enrich the child’s understanding of how math is part of daily life. Banana for Two focuses on the concept of amounts of one and two, and Clean Up, Up, Up! focuses on the concept of spatial relations. These two board books are based upon work supported in part by TERC under a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Board Books

Books and Bricks: How a School Rebuilt the Community

Books and Bricks: How a School Rebuilt the Community is based on an inspiring true story about a South African school when Nelson Mandela was president.