Let’s Celebrate the CBCA Book Week 2025 Winners!

The Children’s Book Council of Australia has announced the 2025 winners and honours book and the chosen books are filled with heart, craft and classroom potential! At Learn From Play we’ve prepared ready-to-teach packs for every Picture Book of the Year, Early Childhood, and Eve Pownall winner, honour and shortlisted title so you can have rich, engaging lessons with as little prep as possible.

Picture Book of the Year. 

The winning Picture Book of the Year is The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell, a warm story about belonging and unlikely friendship. If you’ve been with us this year you’ll know this title was also chosen for National Simultaneous Storytime, so we built a full classroom suite to match. You can dip in for a one-off lesson or stretch it into a mini-unit. There are twenty-two activities ready to go: build-your-own truck printables, draw-a-cat character, sequencing and retells, mazes, similarities and differences, persuasive and imaginative writing, a letter from the driver, and even a quick European folk dance to get bodies moving while brains connect to the text.

The honour books are Afloat by Kirli Saunders and Freya Blackwood, and These Long-Loved Things by Josh Pyke and Ronojoy Ghosh. You’ll find activities that invite close reading, visual literacy and thoughtful discussion for both. 

The shortlist rounds out a beautiful field with A Leaf Called Greaf, The Garden of Broken Things, and We Live in a Bus. Each has a matching Learn From Play pack so you can choose a class favourite and teach straight away.

Early Childhood

The Early Childhood winner is The Wobbly Bike by Darren McCallum and Craig Smith. 

It’s rhythmic, funny and perfect for shared reading. Our pack is perfect for young children with targeted activities for fine motor, simple counting and fun colouring pages as little ones learn the power of persistence and the idea that practice makes progress.

The honour books are How to Move a Zoo by Kate Simpson and Owen Swan, and One Little Dung Beetle by Rhiân Williams and Anne Yi. We’ve created gentle, hands-on activities for each, from vocabulary and oral language prompts to mini-investigations about animals and habitats. 

The shortlist adds Don’t Worry, Felix, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Tooth Fairy (And Some Things You Didn’t), and the Shadow judges winner Spiro. 

Eve Pownall Award

For Eve Pownall information books, the winner is Always Was, Always Will Be by Aunty Fay Muir and Sue Lawson, which explores First Nations knowledge and connection to Country with clarity and respect. 

Our companion pack supports careful, age-appropriate conversation through discussion - yarning - prompts, vocabulary work including key terms, visual literacy of page design, and mapping activities that link Country, place names and personal connection. 

The honour books are Making the Shrine by Laura J Carroll, and South with the Seabirds by Jess McGeachin. Both come with activities that foster content knowledge and creative response. 

The shortlist features Design & Building on Country by Alison Page and Paul Memmott with Blak Douglas, Flora: Australia’s Most Curious Plants by Tania McCartney, and I am a Magpie, I am a Currawong by Bridget Farmer. Each title has a Learn From Play set ready to help students research, compare texts and present what they learn in accessible ways.

New Illustrator

For our youngest learners, the New Illustrator winner Grow Big, Little Seed is a beautiful springboard for gentle conversation. The unique paper cut artwork offers plenty of scope for craft activities while the story opens space to talk about loss, hope and new life in a way that feels safe. 

We’ve also released classroom-ready packs for When I Was a Little Girl, Digger Digs Down and The Land Recalls You.

Each set is built to start discussions with young children — picture walks, vocabulary and oral language prompts, draw-and-tell responses, and quick STEM or geography links where they fit — so you can move smoothly from read-aloud to purposeful learning without losing the joy of the story.

While we do not make resource packs for them, we want to cheer for the other categories too. Congratulations to the winner of Younger Readers Laughter is the Best Ending by Maryam Master with design by Astred Hicks and I’m Not Really Here by Gary Lonesborough, winner of Older Readers. 

Everything on Learn From Play is built for busy schools. With our simple download system you can see each page in the resource pack and can print a single task to fill five golden minutes, or weave a handful of activities together for a neat sequence that covers comprehension, vocabulary, writing and reflection with room for creativity and play. If you are planning a winners’ wall, print the book covers, add a student-written blurb, and add finished Learn From Play activities across the term. That way it becomes an ongoing celebration of the best in Australian literature and a great prompt for student borrowing.

This Book Week, embrace the buzz, enjoy the books, and let the awards energy carry you through this most exciting week of costumes, story and adventure!

Warmly,

Rachel McCann 

Founder, Learn From Play