The emotional intelligence of preschool and primary school children develops during a sensitive period, when experience shifts from an immediate form to a conscious one, and literary works act as one of the means of this transition. Despite broad recognition of such a role, it remains unclear which properties of a work, and by which methods of working with it, secure the growth of particular constituents of emotional intelligence; the age stages are studied separately. The aim is to build an age-differentiated model relating the component structure of emotional intelligence to the properties of children's literature. A structural-functional approach, conceptual analysis, content analysis of normative documents and modelling were applied. It was established that the literary means is heterogeneous with respect to the components of emotional intelligence: the identification and understanding of emotions take shape earlier and predominantly through the content of the text, whereas the regulation of experience relies on the method of pedagogical work. A typology of reading situations is proposed, ordered by the depth of emotional processing – from emotional contagion to reflective correlation with personal experience – with an indication of the pedagogical condition for transition between levels. The differentiation of means at the preschool and primary school stages is presented as a continuous superstructure of the reflective plane over immediate experience. The developmental effect is associated with the correspondence between the depth of text processing and the child's age-related capabilities rather than with the choice of work in itself.