I have used Michele Lemieux’s book Stormy Night in elementary school philosophy classes. It’s a great resource for an introductory session to help the students start to recognize philosophical questions and to think about the questions they have.
Stormy Night is wonderfully illustrated with black and white line drawings. It starts off with a young girl going to bed. Kept awake by a storm, she lies there, thinking, “I can’t sleep! Too many questions are buzzing through my head.” All of us, including children, know this feeling.
The remainder of the book is filled with this young girl’s questions and her thoughts about life and death, and their illustrations. “Where does infinity end?” “Is there only one of me in the world?” “Will I always make the right decisions? And how will I know if they’re right?” “Will I know when it’s time to die?”
Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Since 1995 she has taught philosophy in classrooms from preschool to college and beyond. A frequent writer and speaker about precollege philosophy, Jana is the founding president of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People. Follow her on Twitter: @JanaMohrLone