The stories in the Tania series are simple plausible experiences of a preschool girl. While the plots are fairly realistic, the stories are made engaging mainly
through dialogue. Tania is a curious, expressive and thoughtful little girl. Through her eyes the simplest of experiences are new, exciting and filled with wonder.
It is through her eyes that every day experiences become amazing and yet easy to relate to. Your children can easily put them selves in Tania's shoes.
The stories are set in contemporary Mumbai. Tania belongs to a middle class family and lives in a typical housing society. Her parents try to instil in her
values important to them. Consequently Tania learns to be compassionate, sensitive, generous and loving. She also learns to be adventurous, enterprising
and resourceful. Yet she is just a little girl, sometimes mischievous and occasionally outright silly or mean. But her parents and teachers try to turn such
incidents in to a learning experience.
Although Tania's parents are not reluctant to teach her values, they try to guide her in reasoning them out for herself rather than imposing them on her.
They lead by example. In the story "Tania's New Bicycle" mama apologizes to Tania for her error in judgement and expects her to behave the same
way in "Tania Plays a Trick". She also accepts an apology from Tania as graciously as she expects Tania to accept her apology.
I believe that children's stories do not have to use simplistic vocabulary. Reading is how you want to stretch your child's vocabulary. So the words in the
story should challenge your child's language skills. Language has a lot of redundancy. Your child can get the gist of a story without needing to understand
every word in it. In fact it is an important skill to get the big picture without understanding every detail. As the story is read many times over the child will
understand the meanings of the new words from the context in which they are used. Exposing children to big words especially those with simple meanings
will help them see that there is nothing scary about big words.
The very first story in the Tania series is "The Poor Bedraggled Kitten". The word 'bedraggled' may seem intimidating at first but it has a very
straightforward meaning. Learning such words will give your child confidence.
I do not have great illustrations in my books. The pictures I use serve a functional rather than aesthetic purpose. They lend clarity to the stories
like visual aids in a presentation. The pictures just like the stories are usually quite realistic and are often photographs.
Contact Information
Email: gee.kanika[at]gmail[dot]com