I am Shaima Albishtawi, a mother, architect and emerging author from Jordan.
I have written a series of children’s books with a totally new concept concerning the structure of the story itself.
The series “Adam & Friends” which consists of 6 stories, is aimed at early childhood readers and it took more than 6 months of permanent work. It is illustrated by Laura Scaron from Uruguay and hasn’t been published yet.
The series was created based on two main ideas: Linguistic structure and visual language.
Linguistic structure: Teaching the child the individual word within a story context and then relating it to a sentence: the intention is to teach the child the word and go from it to the sentence. The idea of this book is to fill the gap between the books that teach the child vocabulary individually and the ones with simple sentences
.
Visual language: Teaching the child how to read pictures through his or her search for elements, attentively studying every single detail. In addition to this, the book enriches the visual culture as it contains lots of surrounding elements.
Characters: Adam is the hero of the stories, a nice, independent, friendly, responsible and loving child. He is expected to be a role model for children, always behaving well and taking his story bag with him everywhere he goes.
Adam usually hangs around with two friends, the elephant (female) and the hoopoe (male). The three of them make a visual partnership along the stories.
Another important character is the mother who acquires a main role as in real life, where the mother is always the axis of a child’s life.
The style: The stories have a simple and enjoyable plot that a two-year old can understand. In addition, they establish a number of behavioral orientations that take place between right and wrong, adventure and reality and fantasy which the child enjoys.
They also establish some values like self-reliance, solidarity, love, friendship, the importance of reading, respect and taking care of animals.
Illustrations: Illustrations are simple and colourful, appealing to small children. Mostly drawn in front elevation, with no perspective at all, just like children usually draw their world.
Language: the stories can be published in one language or bilingually.
Series details:
1. Titles:
I Am Hungry
I Love My Mother
Help Me
I Don’t Wont To Sleep
Don’t Go Far
Why Are You Crying ?
. story counts:10 pages,10 lines plus 30 words
My ambition: to let every child in the world enjoy this series
