Kiddie Lit

One nice and seemingly unavoidable result of teaching kids to love reading is that they eventually want to become authors themselves--with some interesting results. Keilana spent the better part of her kindergarten year regaling us with stories of the adventures of dragons named Peanut Butter and Jelly and their baby Jar. With that narrative accomplishment under her belt, she decided to tackle non-fiction by writing a self-help math book. When it was finished, complete with basic equations and illustrations, she insisted we take it to Kinko’s and make spiral-bound copies with fluorescent pink covers. Then she called the local bookstore in Nana’s small town, where she had experienced special literary moments, and asked them if they would carry her book. Caught off guard, the proprietor didn’t really know how to respond. But Keilana has always been clever and persuasive, so five copies found their way to Margie’s Book Nook in the first and only printing of To Help You Do Math. Before my friend Marguerite’s daughter, Sara L. McCarthy, was a successful college grad/wife/new mom, she was a precocious little scribe who wrote stories and one of them became a book her mother was nice enough to share with us. In The Rats Meet The Cat, there is some comedy, some tragedy, and even a moral or two. Nice work for a kid, huh? Maybe someone is out there doing complex trigonometry (as if there were any other kind) because they were inspired by Keilana’s instruction manual. You never know.

http://margiesbooknook.net/