Steps to writing a children’s book require you taking special efforts because children perceive the world differently from adults.

Determine the Age Group to Target in Children’s Book Writing

The first step specifically concerns identifying the age of children for which the book is to be written. Most importantly, consider the following:

• Focus on children’s developmental stage and cognitive skills,

• Determine the related ability to differentiate real and fantastic things (like those that appear in fairy tales),

• Draw comparison between the development stage, age, and the ability to detect analogies.

That’s why, writing requires considering such aspects as developmental skills of children and the purpose for which the book is to be written in order to facilitate the child’s learning process and select the style of illustrations in picture books.

Identify the Target Reader of the Children’s Book

Determine the audience for the book. Moreover, you should not only take into account the age and developmental group of children, but parents who will read the book to their kids. So, the content should be educative, and pictures should be appealing and illustrate the story to facilitate analogical thinking.

Set the Purpose

Children’s books are first aimed at educating the child. Therefore, educational goals can include:

• Teaching new words;

• Imparting the morale;

• Educating how to find solutions to problems and connect events;

• Teaching to find analogies and associations.

According to the research by Strouse et al. (2018), for the purpose of teaching moral lessons and problem-solving skills, the book should contain illustrations and the content that are more realistic than fantastic. The reason is that younger children perceive the book as an object. It is difficult for them to draw analogies between fantastic events and real-world situations.

Therefore, if the writer wants to achieve the educational purpose, he or she should create rather realistic characters and pictures. It concerns the target group of kids from two to eight years. Such children only learn to develop connections between close objects or events. So, the younger the kid, the simpler the connection should be. Further, after learning associations between simple objects, kids can identify analogies between objects and abstract things. Furthermore, add-ons in the book should not distract the child from the content.

Another purpose of children’s book is the interaction between the parent and the kid. The former should explain the latter some important content, particularly, the moral lesson, character’s actions, and the problem and its solution. According to Strouse et al. (2018), parent’s task during reading is to help the child understand real and fantastical information and to develop associations.

Remember Steps to Writing a Children’s Book

The key points to be taken into account in steps to writing a children’s book:

• the age group and developmental stage;

• the purpose: to teach words and letters or problem-solving skills and moral lessons (or both);

• fantastic (animal or magical ) or real characters (humans);

• real or fantastic illustrations (choose real for children between two – eight years to develop analogical thinking).

References

Strouse, G. A., Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2018). The role of book features in young children’s transfer of information from picture books to real-world contexts. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050