"When I got the ABC of the Body in my hand and saw it, I felt, for the first time in my 40-year career, that NOW we should really work with the "body"! I became so happy! We have started from the book, developed(s) and been inspired throughout the school year, both the children and us educators!”
When we received these words from a teacher in a preschool class at a school in Malmö, everyone can probably understand how it felt. Getting great reviews is one thing, but to understand that a school class has worked for an entire school year based on the book we created was very special. Therefore, we also want to give advice on how to work with a book, both to get more children to love reading and to highlight important subjects.
The school used the book both to learn about letters and words and to talk about so many other things. By working with each letter – sometimes on the same theme as the book, sometimes on completely separate subjects – the children's imagination and creativity were allowed to flow while they understood how a book can be read in so many ways. That it is the reader who creates the book, much more than you might think.
We wrote Kroppens ABC because we lacked a book like it. It all started with a comment on Facebook. "How should I talk to my toddler about periods" one of us asked one day in a parenting forum. It was before menstruation became the subject of podcasts, summer talks and books, and we wanted to find the right level for young children, so that we could explain why mom was bleeding without answering a lot of questions that the children didn't ask. "Someone should write a children's book about it" - and why not us?
Several years and a few babies later, we held it in our hands, the book we toiled over in our spare moments and edited on phone screens while we put the kids to sleep. All work was done remotely, from Malmö, Linköping and Stockholm. Because we didn't know each other when we got the idea. We met once to get to know each other and talk together, then each wrote separately. When we started talking, we realized that there were lots of things we thought were interesting for children that were never covered in the classic body fact books. We also knew from our own children how exciting it was with letters, so the combination felt just right. It was not entirely easy to find the right word for each letter, and it became perhaps even more clever when the fantastic illustrator Alaya was connected, and would complement our words with pictures. But in the end, of course, it was Alaya's pictures that made the book what it is.
Never could we have dreamed that it would become part of the everyday life of an entire school class for a year, or that it would have such importance as one reader testifies here:
"Through the children's book "Kroppens ABC" the child came into contact with the concept of queer and expressed that "that's ME after all". She was gently introduced to him from the start and now embraced it with immense relief at finding a way to describe herself. The suicidal thoughts and the desire to hurt themselves subsided, the child dared to seek contact with other children and made friends. Friends who accepted him as just him and stand up for him both in front of adults who are the wrong gender and other children."
/Eva Emmelin, Lina Boozon Ekberg and Linda Madsen
