With each and every release, Cardinal Rule Press includes resources to enhance the reading experience, both for kids, and for parents! The important messages about diversity, self-empowerment, and community-orientation can be hard to understand and explain to children, a job that often falls on support systems like therapists. But never fear, our catalog of books, useful backmatter, and additional freebies are great resources for exactly these issues! Here are the top ten available downloads, videos, and books for parents and therapists alike:

1. The Bucket Filler Series

There’s no better place to start at Cardinal Rule Press than with our Bucket Fillers series, written by Carol McCloud. These books share a revolutionary mindset that can help guide kids through their early years and beyond, while giving parents, educators, and therapists the language to discuss the ways in which positive actions and words can ‘fill a bucket,’ while the opposite takes away. It can help kids understand that they can stand up for themselves and put a ‘lid’ on their bucket to stop others from taking from it. Overall, these books are fantastic resource for having a wide range of conversations and teaching foundational interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. 

2. Bucket Filler Pledge

Not only are the Bucket Fillers books available on Cardinal Rule Press, but they also come with helpful resources to clarify, expand, and make actionable the ideas put forth in each book. This handy Bucket Filler Pledge, for instance, is the perfect way to help children make a commitment to filling buckets in a tangible way, and gives them, and the adults helping them, a way to keep them accountable. 

3. Bucket Filler Posters

Alongside many of the Bucket Fillers books are downloadable posters that can be printed and hung as illustrations and reminders of the values and ideas that are promoted by the ‘bucket-filling’ method. From the traffic light model, to the power of using one’s lid, to the whole set of purchasable A-Z bucket filler posters, these can act as the perfect resource to remind parents, children, and therapists alike to take a moment and reflect on one’s words and actions, while making the ideas more colorful and engaging. 

4. Journals and Self-Reflection Resources 

Carol McCloud’s Growing Up with a Bucket Full of Happiness comes with a set of super helpful tools to promote reflection on one’s bucket-filling journey, including a journal, a daily questionnaire, and ideas on how to fill buckets! These are among some of the most useful available resources on Cardinal Rule Press for parents and therapists to give kids a place to work out and record their thoughts and actions in a way that can spark conversations and bring up questions about growth and improvement. 

5. Foreign Language Books

Several of Cardinal Rule Press’ bestselling books, including Chocolate Milk, Por Favor and Evie’s Field Day are also available in Spanish! In an effort to expand availability and accessibility of our social-emotional learning titles, we are working on offering them in different languages, complete with their original illustrations and lyrical writing!

Here at Cardinal Rule Press, we are happy to help you with resources for your bookstore or library. Click HERE for your freebie!

6. Live Bilingual Readings 

Alongside our translated Spanish titles, we have one of the coolest and most useful resources available on Cardinal Rule Press, live bilingual read-alouds with the author and a translator! These videos can be accessed on our website and can add another dimension of learning to these titles, as well as make them more accessible in a wider range of circumstances, which can be useful for parents, teachers, kids, and therapists!

7. Reader’s Guides 

Each and every one of our releases comes with a free, downloadable reader’s guide chock full of information, resources, games, tools for thinking about the book’s plot and characters, and a whole lot more! Definitely be sure to check out all of the amazing offerings for our back catalog and upcoming titles!

8. Coloring Pages 

Many of our bestselling titles, including Dazzling Travis and The Jelly Donut Difference, come with free coloring pages. These can be an exciting way to engage with each book, giving kids a way to customize aspects of the characters and demonstrate that the messages in each book can apply them in so many different ways!

9. Read Alouds 

For a ton of our amazing titles, there are free recorded read-alouds on our website! These live readings can give kids a new way to interact with the stories, as well as a chance to see the author who wrote them, and are a great way to increase engagement with the content of each book. Several of them also have an ASL translator present, making our great stories that much more accessible!

10. Back Matter 

Be sure to also check out the resources and information included in the back matter of each of our titles! This is where you can find comprehension questions, facts about the author, and a whole lot more! Reading the story is only the first step, so be sure to take a look at all of the cool stuff Cardinal Rule Press offers after the cover is closed at our website under ‘Downloads and Resources.’

Don't forget your free downloadable HERE!