To celebrate Nonfiction Monday, I’m announcing my 4 ABC books that just came out with Capstone Press.
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These were fun projects to work on! They’re for 1st and 2nd graders, and they’re full of great photos. Each page has brief text on it, like
D is for dagger.
A dagger is a big, sharp knife.
When pirates attacked, they
used daggers, swords, and
other weapons.
(from A Is for Arrr! A Pirate Alphabet)
At the end of the alphabet, there are some Fun Facts, a Glossary, and some recommended resources for kids who want to read books or visit online sites about the topic.
Although the text of each book is short, they are nonfiction books and required a fair amount of research. Well, except for Y Is for Yowl. That one, A Scary Alphabet, mostly just required a spooky frame of mind! Z Is for Zoom was the most research-intensive for me–and I learned lots of cool stuff about car racing!
Capstone did a great job with the designs. In Y Is for Yowl: A Scary Alphabet, the text boxes are black and kind of tombstone-shaped, and several have big spiders crawling along them. In A Is for Arrr! A Pirate Alphabet, the text boxes are tan and weathered-looking, like old treasure maps. In Z Is for Zoom: A Race Car Alphabet, they look like caution flags, and in P Is for Pom Pom! A Cheerleading Alphabet, they have clean lines and trim work that makes them resemble the uniforms in many of the pictures.
I’m finishing up two more for this series, and I’m at the outlining stage of two more that I’ll write later this fall. I turn in the outline, editors and product planners offer notes and/or revise the outline, and then photo research begins. Two or three months later, I get the photos that have been selected, and then I write the text.
I think these’ll be fun books to share with kids at school and library visits.