If you’ve ever suspected {that a} foot could be a fish – and who hasn’t – this ebook is for you, particularly if you happen to’re 5 to eight years outdated. This ebook can be for you if you happen to hope your youngsters, and all people else’s, know find out how to inform truth from fiction earlier than they know find out how to vote.
Best-selling kids’s writer and illustrator Cornelia Maude Spelman makes the case for kids seeing issues as they’re, not as another person says they’re or as we want them to be. She charts a easy path utilizing absurd, however enjoyable, comparisons to shiny-gentle the way in which: A Foot Is Not a Fish! Gosh darn it.
“It is a brave book,” wrote The Wall Street Journal, and “Spelman deserves kudos for writing and illustrating it.”
Why courageous? Maybe as a result of it pushes again – with love – in opposition to all these “alternative facts” muddying up the world. As nicely as these “It’s true because I say it’s true” pronouncements that even adults typically have hassle checking out.
Parents are fighting find out how to assist youngsters perceive a world wherein “people you are supposed to admire [seem to be] lying all the time,” Spelman SAID.
Viewed that approach, A Foot Is Not a Fish! will not be solely courageous, it’s elementary.
Truth is straightforward to identify
Spelman additionally needs youngsters to know that reality simply isn’t that tough to acknowledge.
“They know that night is not day,” she mentioned.
Reading this ebook alone or with a mother or father can assist to anchor that concept: Don’t be confused. You can know the reality.
Spelman is the broadly learn writer of The Way I Feel collection – 2 million copies in 10 languages – designed to assist youngsters establish and deal with feelings. She and her husband have lived in Evanston for 43 years, elevating two Evanston Township High School graduates (a son and a daughter) and not seeing practically sufficient of their 4 grandchildren.
Before selecting up her fountain pens to put in writing (she has seven, every a distinct coloration ink, no cartridges), Spelman was a scientific and adoption social employee, therapist, trainer and radio host. Author of Your Body Belongs to You, she is intent on kids studying to take cost of their lives.
But it may possibly’t all be all that severe, can it? Nope, Spelman agreed. When dad and mom and kids learn collectively, they need to be “having fun,” she instructed the RoundTable. And, in its absurdity, this ebook is enjoyable: “A foot is not a fish / and a cat is not an egg. / Chickens do not bark, / and a hand is not a leg.” Spelman’s gentle, aspect-by-aspect illustrations again up her gentle verse.
The ebook’s message is well timed and timeless: “We have to stop the nonsense,” Spelman mentioned. The crucial classes: “Facts have a way of staying facts” and “On that we must agree.”
But what if we are able to’t agree? Back to the fundamentals: “We need to know just what is true, / To know what’s real, what’s not. / ‘Cause if we get them all mixed up, / we’ll be confused a lot.”
Obvious enjoyable
The enjoyable begins with the apparent: “Chickens do not bark;” strikes to the sensible – “Evidence is what we need, / Real things that we can see;” and on to the conceptual – “A wish is not a fact, / A wish is just a wish. / I’d like my birthday every day, / But a foot is not a fish.”
Spelman retains it easy, avoiding how-to-reply recommendation. What can your baby say, for instance, when a good friend makes a declare that’s unfaithful or hurtful? She doesn’t chunk. Neither does she deal with persuasion or confrontation.
That mentioned, this ebook is an amazing “opportunity to really talk,” she mentioned, as a substitute of dismissing on-the-spot ache or bewilderment that deserves consideration: “Johnny said I was wrong today. He called me a liar.”
To drive residence the ebook’s reality-or-confusion theme, Spelman means that kids give you fill-in-the-clean examples: A __________ will not be a __________. (Rhyming not required.) Be ready to give you one or two your self.
She caught me off guard by opening my interview along with her query: “What’s your example?” “Uh … A hand is not a horse?” Generously, and with a touch of sympathy, she mentioned, “Good. You can use alliteration if you want. Also minerals and vegetables.”
OK. Thanks. But “A hand is not a horse”? Really? Sheesh.
A Foot Is Not a Fish! Frederator Books. $15.99 Hardcover, $6.99 Paperback.