Picture Books are an important aspect in a child's life. Through this shared media they can discover, discuss and understand the world around them. Original research started with informal interviews with young children and their parents to discover which books they share and read together also what subjects are relevant to the young reader. Shoes and their importance to a pre-schooler came apparent in these discussions.
When creating my children's picture book I wanted it to be visually creative and playful to connect to a young target audience. The narrative from my picture book consists of a repetitive rhyming text and introduces each new location that the characters visit. The children's narrative follows the characters of Sam and Pip through their week of adventure accompanied by Boots their mischievous kitten. The character Boots appears on every double page spread however the character is sometimes hard to find which makes it fun for the young reader. When looking at the statutory requirements for my target audience, which is reception, years 1 and 2, I saw that the children had to spell the days of the week and common exception words. My feedback from the primary schools was very positive! The children interacted well with the characters especially Boots the mischievous kitten. Some of the children didn't think that boys could do ballet so some elements of my work have helped challenge children's stereotypical views. My opening pages created class discussions which I hoped would happen, some classes actually used my concept to develop into lessons which I was very honoured to be apart of. I was pleased to be informed that some children were still using the ideas from my book to independently write their own stories. I was pleased with the positive feedback. One head teacher strongly agreed with me using shoes as a narrative because shoes are a very important component in acquisition of life skills. A teacher from Cheshire East thought it was a lovely book to share after class or before lunch and was very pleased that my picture book consists of the conjunction ‘or’ which is extremely hard to find on the market. Another teacher was pleased I included some elements of the statutory requirements such as days of the week which is perfect for my demographic.