Children's Storybook Based on Childhood Memories

As a child, I’ve always been fond of reading and writing. I’ve always thought of writing as one of the best ways I could express myself. It was a tool I used in times of boredom, and a skill I used throughout my whole school life. Out of curiosity, I would always find the most random things to write about, and there would be times where I would decide to create my own short stories. It was a way for me to escape the world and enter a new one where the only things that seemed to exist were me and the words on my paper.

I have always been told that I am a very family-oriented person. Most people know that I grew up spending a lot of time with my family members and building memories with them. My family has always played a huge role in almost all aspects of my life. I had a great childhood growing up; being loved by many. With these facts about myself, I wanted to create a project where I can convey all the mentioned facts in one. I decided that my personal project would be to create a children’s book. This book is a digital one in order to minimize unnecessary physical contact during a pandemic. My goal for this project is to create a children’s book to showcase my childhood memories that can entertain other children. This book consists of seven short stories based on my own memories from the past that are targeted to young readers from the ages 7-11 years old.

As someone who’s never created a children’s book before, creating this project came with many challenges. Firstly, I had no experience in designing a book, therefore it was something new that I had to learn. Next, as it’s a children’s book, illustrations were a crucial part of my product, which was another challenging factor as I’m not a very skilful artist. Lastly, I had to continue developing my writing skills throughout creating the product.

Global Context

The global context that my project relates to the most is Personal and Cultural Expression. This global context studies the ways in which living things express themselves through their creativity. It relates to my project because writing is mostly about being able to express yourself in the form of words. In this case, it was done in the form of a collection of short stories for children—a children’s book. While writing these stories, it gave me a chance to express myself and give the readers a glimpse of what my childhood was like.

Product

Memories in Words managed to satisfy my expectations in creating this product. It fulfilled my goal statement and also fit in with the specifications in the rubrics page I made. As the product is a digital one, it is easily accessible to anyone who wanted to read the book. The whole product was in a PDF file, and it was published online with an EPUB which meant that it was very eco-friendly and simple to use. Using an online flipbook called FlipHTML5, I uploaded my children’s book. The contents of the book consisted of the table of contents, seven short stories in total, accompanied by a few digital illustrations for every story.

As I aimed to create a minimalistic yet colourful product to make it look appealing to the young readers, I am glad that I was able to pursue the idea. I wanted to make my product easy to go through and understand for the readers to avoid any confusion. I am most proud of the digital illustrations that I made on my own. The illustrations were something I had to learn on the spot, and I’m very content with how they turned out in the end.

Check out my book below!

Reflection

Throughout working on my Personal Project, it was an experience that allowed me to expose myself to doing and learning many new things. In doing so, I got to develop as a person. Learning to be a productive person was a skill that I developed immensely. I learned to be able to express myself as part of my Personal & Cultural Expression as a student. Personally, I’ve never found it easy to express myself fully to many people, so writing this book allowed me to do just that. In writing these stories, I was expressing my gratefulness for the wonderful childhood I had growing up. Doing this project allowed me to stay motivated in doing my work, as I had to make sure that I was always on the go and not left behind. My time-management skills improved greatly while working on this project as I was always planning ahead and made sure to get things done before their deadlines.

Designing a book and illustrating digitally were some things that I had to learn quickly on the spot. This activated my learning skills as I learned new information about it until I was able to do it. Overall, I feel that I learned many new skills—so much more than I would’ve expected. The goal of my product was to have it be an entertainment for the readers, mainly children, so while creating my product, I would always reflect on how I think my product would look like from a younger reader’s perspective. The whole journey of this Personal Project hasn’t been an easy one, but it’s definitely one that taught me many lessons that will follow me for a long time coming.

IB Learner Reflection

In doing this project, I had to be Knowledgeable and a Thinker. I needed to use the knowledge I already had in writing and enhance it to take it a step further to create a children’s book that will be read by other readers. I was constantly thinking while doing my project: thinking about story ideas, the design of the book, the writings, and the illustrations.

This project allowed me to be a Communicator, as I had to reach out to several people to conduct interviews, and also ask multiple people’s feedback once I completed the product. I stepped outside of my comfort zone for this, as I am personally a shy and reserved person when it comes to meeting new people, which makes me a Risk-Taker. When communicating to other people for their feedback about my book, I had to be Open-Minded. I couldn’t be closed off to anyone’s opinions for the better of my product. All comments by others had to be received without hard feelings to make this product the best it can be.

I needed to be Reflective when creating my product, to make sure that this book was a good read, not only for myself, but also for other readers, especially the younger ones. As this Personal Project consumed a lot of my time, I had to learn to be Balanced. Despite the stress and pressure that came alongside this project, I had to make sure that I was still living a life outside of my project and taking good care of myself. I learned to dedicate times where I would work, and other times where I would allow myself to have fun and let loose. Upon working and completing my Personal Project, many new skills and IB Learner Profiles were attained and maintained.