I created 2 picture books using the tool Storybird. I wrote 2 stories because it was required for using Storybird. These 2 stories affected me in such a way, one as a child and one as a teen, impressing upon me to show people kindness and love.

     The story from my childhood is “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” found in the Bible in Luke 10:25-37. It shows that love and compassion has no boundaries for any person, regardless of who they are or what they believe. I left out the reference to the Bible, but the context is the same.

     The other story is from my teen years (over 50 years ago) and continues to stay with me. The leader of my church youth group told us a story, called The Original Warm Fuzzy Tale, which was written in 1969 by Claude M. Steiner. It is a story of human emotions given out as warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. Warm fuzzies are love, kindness, affection, happiness, tenderness and many more. Cold pricklies are just the opposite of warm fuzzies. I’m telling my own version of the story, called “The Warm Fuzzy Tale.”

     I chose the tool Storybird, due to it’s simplicity and that my target audience would be pre-k to elementary age, even though children of all ages would enjoy and learn from them. Creating the story books was very simple. I immediately setup the number of pages for each story, and it was simple to move them around to any order. It was easy to add and delete pages as well. “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” is 11 pages and “The Warm Fuzzy Tale” is 12 pages.

     The colorful illustrations I used are from artists that provide their images to Storybird. I used images for both stories. Each page has an illustration that relates to what is written on that page. My choice of images is very colorful and fun for “The Warm Fuzzy Tale” while images for “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” is softer and more subdued. I chose these deliberately keeping in mind the nature of the stories. The stories are simple, and I tried to keep the books simple as well. Simplicity is very important to keep a child’s attention and not to overload their little minds.

     The text used is a plain and dark font on white background This makes it easy to read. The same font was used on both. The construction of the text and images are very coherent, making then neat and simplistic.

 

Below are the 2 links to Storybird for each story.

 

The Warm Fuzzy Tale https://storybird.com/picture-book/the-warm-fuzzy-tale-6d  The link to "The Warm Fuzzy Tale" lets you see how the picture book pages are broken down on the left and on the right all the images are shown with the illustrators name along with their other illustrations.

​

 

 

The Parable of the Good Samaritan https://storybird.com/picture-book/the-parable-of-the-good-samaritan-wt