The Buddy Bench

Kids befriend lonely classmates in this high-energy story of how schoolyards ought to be.

Having seen what being left out is like, children become agents of change, convincing their teacher to let them build a buddy bench.Buddy Benches were introduced in Germany in 2014. When a child sits on the bench, it signals to other children to ask him or her to play. Patty Brozo’s children bring a playground to raucous life while Mike Deas’s illustrations invest their games with images of planes, dragons and elephants. The children match their imaginations with empathy, identifying and swooping up the lonely.