We are so excited to have Rachelle Burk join us today to share information about Movement Picture Books!
Rachelle writes fiction and nonfiction for kids 2-12. She is a council member and mentor for the Rutgers One-On-One Conference, and is a freelance picture book editor. She loves to visit schools across the country with her dynamic author visit program. Find out more at: www.RachelleBurk.com. Or email: rachelleburk@gmail.com. Need writing/publishing/marketing resources? You can find pretty much everything you need on Rachelle’s award-winning kidlit resources site: www.ResourcesForChildrensWriters.com.
STOMP, WIGGLE, CLAP, AND TAP (Callisto Kids) by Rachelle Burk, Illustrated by Alyssa De Asis. Written in perfect read-aloud rhyme, with gentle prompts and lively illustrations that will encourage kids to move and make some noise.
To be honest, writing this book was not my idea. Stop, Wiggle, Clap, and Tap: My First Book of Dance was a work-for-hire project for an educational publisher (Rockridge Press, now Callisto Kids—an imprint of Sourcebooks). They reached out and offered me the project. Writing the book was a challenge for several reasons, one being that I had never written for the toddler-age audience.
The bigger challenge was that I’m not a dancer. This probably makes me a total fraud. In fact, anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a complete klutz with a tendancy to trip or twist in ways that break and tear body parts. Yet, even though “they” say to write what you know, I don’t agree. I believe you should write what interests you. I’ve written about all kinds of things with no background in the subjects, including science, music, and bios of people I’d never heard of. You just have to be enthusiastic and willing to do the research.
My daughters, now adults, watched an insane amount of baby dance videos back during the VHS era, which tends to imprint itself on a mother’s brain forever. The outline for Stop, Wiggle, Clap, and Tap had me isolating different body parts in a progressive format… a stanza focusing on hands and fingers, the next on arms, followed by feet and toes, then legs, and finally putting them all together. Because the target audience is between the ages of one and three, I had to reach way back in my memory to remember what children of those ages can do developmentally. I wrote and then nixed several ideas for being a bit too complicated.
I also considered what most intrigues toddlers and worked those things into the little movement poems. That’s why animals appear on several pages—a flapping bird, a prancing pony, a hopping frog, a wagging dog, and an elephant swaying its trunk. This creates a additional layer of learning and adds a fun aspect to the illustrations as well.
I found myself crawling, wiggling, twirling, and doing all kinds of weird movements around my family room as I worked to develop the movements and figure out how to describe them. I couldn’t help wondering what my neighbors would think if they happened to see me though the window.
The text needed to have a musical feel that would inspire kids to move. For this young age, the sing-song quality that rhyme adds is a big plus. For an older audience, a good rhyming text usually entails unpredictable, complex, and multi-syllable rhymes. But for a toddler book, it was better to aim for the opposite:simple, predictable, and repetitious rhymes, with a rhythm that toddlers and caregivers can easily chant and clap to. For inspiration, I read a lot of classic nursery rhymes and watched YouTube videos with simple movement songs for toddlers.
The amazing illustrator, Alyssa De Asis did a brilliant job bringing the book to life and giving it a joyous party atmosphere. I love how, once an animal character is introduced, it sticks around in all the following illustrations, dancing along with the human characters.
Stop, Wiggle, Clap, and Tap will soon be coming out as a board book as well.