Arnold Lobel wrote the friendship every other children's book measures itself against. Frog is patient, Toad is anxious, and across five short stories they do the small things that actual friendship is made of: they wake each other up for spring, they tell stories when one of them is sick, they hunt a lost button, they go swimming, and in the most famous few pages Lobel ever wrote, Frog fixes the saddest fact in Toad's life, that nobody has ever sent him a letter.

This is the I Can Read Level 2 edition, the format built for children reading with help. The sentences are short and warm, the words repeat just enough, and the watercolor frogs carry a new reader through every page. A Caldecott Honor book, wearing its Celebrating 50 Years badge on the cover.

It has been handed from adults to children for five decades because it works twice: as reading practice, and as an education in being kind. Sixty four pages of both.