board book Archives - Page 2 of 135

Toddler Two
by Anastasia Suen (Author) and Winnie Cheon (Illustrator)

Booktalk: Two adventurous toddlers take an afternoon’s romp through their backyard, blowing bubbles, digging in the sandbox, playing hide-and-seek, riding on swings, and playing with other toys.

As young readers follow along, they discover what comes in twos as the pictures under the flaps unfold – two hands, two feet, two eyes, two ears, two legs, two arms. Two is the number just for them!

After I wrote the small poem Baby Born about a baby’s first year, I wanted to write a book about turning two. The first book went month by month, but that didn’t feel right for the second book.

I tried all kinds of ideas, but nothing was working so I went for my morning walk. I was two blocks away, thinking about the toddler play group we went to when my children were young, and the words started coming . . .

Four miles later, I had a 50 word counting poem! I wrote it down when I came home and soon it was a book in English . . .

. . . and Spanish

. . . and both languages!

It’s #ThrowbackThursday!
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Subway
by Anastasia Suen (Author) and Karen Katz (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: We didn’t have any subways nearby when I was growing up, so riding a subway was something I did years later when we went on family vacations with our children. On one of those vacations, I thought about writing a small poem about the ride, but that was hard to do when I was back home.

After two post-vacation writing attempts, I realized that I needed to write the poem while I was riding the subway. So that’s what I did! Each time we rode the subway during our next vacation, I jotted down a few lines about what we did and how it felt. (I always keep a small pad of paper in my purse to capture ideas.)

Snippet:

When we got back home I used those small notepad lines to write this 169-word picture book poem. As you can see from the book announcement postcard below, Subway was published in 2004.

A few years later, the publisher asked me to tighten the poem so it could be reprinted as a board book. After the 2008 board book appeared in Amazon’s Top 100 for Children’s City Life Books, Amazon made a preview video for it!