Movement Picture Books with Kara Navolio

We are so excited to have Kara Navolio join us today to share information about Movement Picture Books!

Kara Navolio is a children’s book author and freelance writer. Her debut picture book “Everybody Can Dance!” celebrates the joy of dance with a message of inclusion and shows children that no matter what you look like, your physical ability or style, everybody can dance!


Her second book, "Maggie Discovers the Rainbow" was released on March 21, 2023. It's a magical adventure through the rainbow that will help kids feel empowered to try new things and learn how colors can help us express our emotions.

When she isn’t writing for children, Kara tells stories of real-life heroes, artists, and writers for local newspapers and a local magazine, Northgate Living. Kara has been working with children since her college days. Even as she was earning a degree in Business from UC Berkeley, she was volunteering in a local school helping children learn to read. When she had her own two children she volunteered in their classrooms and at their schools for 16 years. Currently she is a docent at The Bedford Gallery where she takes school children on tours and teaches art in local schools.

She loves to read, travel, take photographs, paint, hike, dance, cook, and spend time with her family, especially her new granddaughter. She lives in Walnut Creek, California with her husband and everyday makes it a goal to learn something new. 

"Everybody Can Dance!" was a book I was meant to write. Many things in my life led up to the creation of it. Let's start with the summer of 1980 when I was 16. I traveled to Spain as a foreign exchange student and was placed with the Olavide family in Madrid. The parents, Isabel and Javier, had 5 children:  Bela and 4 boys. I spent most of the summer following Bela around to her dance classes, get-togethers with friends and cousins, sight- seeing and shopping.  Bela went on to become a professional Flamenco dancer, traveling around the world. She returned to Madrid and opened her own dance studio. Although I stayed in touch with the Olavides through yearly Christmas cards, I would not see Bela again until 2016, 36 years later!

When my husband and I decided to take a trip to Spain in 2016, it was a blissful reunion. Bela invited us to see her students dance. I didn't know until I arrived at the show that Bela's students were young adults with Down Syndrome.  Seeing the joy in their faces and the pride Bela had in her students made my heart burst. It was beautiful.

Yet, the idea for a children's book was nowhere in my thoughts at that time. I was working on two other manuscripts not related to dance. It was not until 2017, when I was revisiting my memories of that trip, that the idea came to me in a flash. With thoughts of Bela's students combined with my experience watching my daughter dance for 15 years and seeing my niece Jenna, who is a Little Person, dance when she was younger, the idea was born in my mind that every person has this desire to express themselves.  I knew then that I wanted to write a children’s book that showed kids that dance is one way we can all come together. No matter what we look like or what our skill level is, dance is unifying. I wanted to write a book that could do its small part to show kids that we are all more alike than different.

I knew that a book about dance needed to have a good beat.  I had never written in rhyme before, and it is not easy to do. I soon learned that it is more than just two words that have a similar ending sound.  I studied online resources for days learning about the beats of words, and how to create blocks of text with not just the right syllables but also the right hard and soft beats.  It took many, many revisions to get it right.

I was thrilled to have the book featured on the BBC’s CBeeBies bedtime stories show in Oct. 2022 where it was read and signed by deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis, winner of Britain’s dance reality show “Strictly Come Dancing.” It was also chosen for a Storybook Walk in Northeastern New York by the CEF Library. I love bringing this book to classrooms where we read and dance together.

Thanks so much for joining us, Kara!

You can find Kara at www.karanavolio.com, Youtube, and you can find her books here and here.

Movement Picture Books with Rachelle Burk

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.

Thanks so much for joining us, Rachelle!

You can find Rachelle at www.RachelleBurk.com, Facebook @ facebook.com/rachelleburk, X (Twitter) @Rachelleburk, or Instagram @ instagram.com/rachelleburk/.