Savvy Parenting : A Reading List for the New Year, Preschool-Style The Savvy Source for Parents

So many (and so many wonderful) books for preschoolers are about bedtime, closing down after a day, quieting down and putting an end to things for at least a stretch.

But starting a new year is like waking up from a winter's nap, and what about books about getting going, making a start of it, looking ahead?

Well, there's A Great Day for Up, which we truly adore both for its energy and for its moral about sleeping in!

There's Diary of a Wombat, which isn't about mornings at all but is very much about being resolute, which we find delightful in ourselves in January and amusing in our children at all times.

And while we're in the funny pages, there's our adored Charlie Hits It Big, which is about a fresh start and a big break and a new gig, all absolutely hilariously. And of course there's a happy homecoming, which makes it especially well-suited for preschoolers.

More simply, there's the cheerful morning conversation between sun and girl in "Good Morning, Merry Sunshine" in Gyo Fujikawa's masterfully illustrated A Child's Book of Poems.

Only Walt Whitman can describe a wide open road so plainly and elegantly that your little one will want immediately to take to it. Look at the excerpt from his "Song of the Open Road" in our favorite collection by Caroline Kennedy.

How to Be sets the perfect tone for a family new year, providing great resolutions about behavior and amusing pictures to keep the whole exercise vivid.

We hope your own start to the year, both real and echoed in readings, is grand!

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Our team of City Editors is chiming in with other great reading lists to get you started -- don't miss Nashville's top three!