Toodle-oo Ruby Blue Two little girls have been playing together and now it is time for one of them to go home. Saying goodbye is hard for little kids. Sometimes it's a child's mother or father leaving for work, sometimes it's the loss of a grandparent. Little tragedies as well as big tragedies can be huge problems for little kids.
These days when the whole world is wobbly, saying goodbye can be especially difficult. It's the reason at Garn Press that we are making a digital copy of Toodle-oo Ruby Blue available for parents, caregivers and teachers to share with little kids. It is a reassuring story with beautiful illustrations by Rachel Backshall.
To foster resilience in children it is important that we do everything we can to create safe, joyful spaces for them to play. It is also important that their lives have some predictability and they have fun.
Creating safe, predictable experiences for children is not always easy, especially right now when the entire world has the wobbles, but books like Toodle-oo Ruby Blue do provide safe joyful spaces in which children can have fun and find messages of hope and reassurance.
In books messages of kindness are often found in little things that happen in the illustrations, or in events that take place almost in the margins of the story. Sometimes the caring is in the details, like Ruby Blue's parents making cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies, and then a few pages later making a big glorious cake with chocolate layers and purple icing. These are events that are not central to the story, but they give parents, caregivers and teachers a lot to talk about and they can make connections to children's lives.
"Do you remember the cupcakes we made with orange icing? They were yummy "
Most importantly, Toodle-oo Ruby Blue, like so many other children's stories, nurtures the imagination. To become resilient and to cope with crises as they occur, children need safe, joyful spaces in which to imagine the world as it might be otherwise. They need the opportunity to imagine that toy elephants can grow and become full size, that a tiny toy giraffe can become too big to fit in the bath, and that an orangutan can jump all around the room and hang from the light fixture because it is cool.
Children need to feel safe and secure to enjoy these imaginative moments.
When the world is wobbly, the most reassuring experience a child can have is sitting with a parent, caregiver or teacher reading a children's book.
Sharing books like Toodle-oo Ruby Blue is doubly reassuring, because the language in the story is also predictable and children quickly join in the reading and want to talk about the illustrations.
Toodle-oo Lilly Wu I had fun playing with you.
And so it becomes a performance piece. The little children enact the rituals of saying goodbye, knowing there will be other times when they can play.
Come back soon Lilly Wu - I really had fun playing with you
After reading the story children can draw themselves playing with toys that grow to be much bigger than themselves. In their drawings they can play with enormous elephants or swim with gigantic whales, and tigers can be drawn so big it's impossible to hide them.
So put on some music, pile up some pillows, and catch the tiger as he jumps out of the book and into the room.