We Wrote & Illustrated a Children’s Book!
From the creators of Slow Camino comes My South American Classroom. The picture book narrates the highs and lows of our family gap year from the perspective of our oldest child.
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How It All Started
Why a book for kids? In our home, children’s books lay in haphazard piles on every horizontal surface. We haul them home by the dozen from the library in a big plastic wagon. Whether we are planning a big trip, anticipating a life change, or want to broach a complex topic with our boys, a children’s book serves as the perfect conversation starter. That said, when we were planning our gap year abroad, we found barely anything for the younger ones.
Our family of five spent an entire year homeschooling—or world-schooling, as some like to call it—while traveling South America. It was a beautiful and awe-inspiring experience. And, as one would expect, we also suffered the occasional low point.
Liuan is a professional writer and author, and I’m an amateur painter. Combining our talents, we decided to create the bedtime read we wish we had before we left home.
Synopsis
Is it better to spend third grade on another continent, making friends in different languages and exploring new places, or am I just missing out on life back home?
Eight-year-old Oliver asks himself this throughout a year of traveling with his parents and two little brothers. Will his friends have fun without him? Will he get behind on schoolwork? Are all these endless bus rides worth it? As Oliver makes friends who don’t speak the same language, overcomes travel mishaps, and takes on new challenges, he grows in his confidence to navigate different landscapes and cultures.
We decided the book should culminate and resolve at the lowest point of our trip: the time we failed to cross the Argentine-Bolivian border. To make matters worse, Oliver, our oldest son and the book’s protagonist, suffered severe altitude sickness. (Every family member capable of writing wrote about it. Here are Oliver’s, Liuan’s and my takes).
As parents, we typically try to shoot straight with our kids. As such, we didn’t shy away from centering the narrative around our travel drama, while also including the more captivating experiences like hot springs, waterfalls and volcanoes.
Overall, it’s a book about overcoming fear and anxiety, not through some trick or life hack, but simply by trying, enduring, and coming out on the other side eager to see what comes next.
The Creative Process
Shortly after our return from our year abroad, Liuan hatched the idea for this project. We started by separately writing a story, attempting in relatively few words to provide an engaging and accurate account of what it’s like to do what we did.
Our boys listened to our stories and gave feedback. Liuan’s scored a ten and mine a 9.5, so we used hers as the base and added the best parts from mine. Then we shared our work-in-progress and continued to improve it based on the comments we received from our kids, family, friends and publisher.
By far the most time-consuming part of the process were the illustrations. I did all my artwork in acrylic on canvas paper using photos from our trip. Sometimes I mixed in a background from one photo and superimposed another that depicts the boys are in action. The goal was to tell the real story, even if it was just a snapshot of all that happened.
How You Can Support Our Work
The book is now available in hardcover and paperback. Order yours today!
Written and illustrated by the authors of this blog.
A Book for Little Travelers
A True Story From Our Gap Year
