Teresa Wood, an ESL teacher at Carver High School and Walkertown High School, is releasing her first children's book “Can You Laugh Like a Giraffe?” this week.
Starting out as a story she told her son and growing in complexity over the course of several years, “Can You Laugh Like a Giraffe?” follows an animal named Tulo and his various animal friends. The creatures enjoy a wide range of rhyming activities, going on to twirl like a squirrel, roar like a dinosaur, talk like a hawk, and dance like fire ants.
As an ESL teacher, Wood says that rhymes are extremely helpful for new English speakers who are learning to navigate English sounds. The examples listed above all feature rhyming sounds that aren’t spelled the same way, and setting them to a lyrical cadence makes them easier to remember. While the book is mostly meant for younger children, Wood imagines that even her high school students might find it useful in some situations.
“I think the illustrations are for any age, they don’t look too focused on just a younger population,” Wood said. “To teach the concept of rhyme in the English language, I think it can be good.”
Those illustrations come from Wake Forest University Sophomore Belle Gambino, an art student who Wood found when she decided she was ready to publish the book. Gambino drew on her own experiences reading books with her mother when she was a child to guide her creative process. She believes that attaching images to words can be a powerful memory tool that will help students retain the vocabulary better.
“When children are first starting to read, pictures come first,” Gambino said. “When parents read the same story over and over again, then children start to correlate those word on the page with what the pictures say.”
Wood was partly motivated to write the book by the changing relationship she’s observed between students and books over the years. As technology becomes a larger presence in young people’s lives, attention spans have shortened and reading has become less popular. She feels that the magic of sitting down with a book and getting lost in it is harder to find among students.
If “Can You Laugh Like a Giraffe?” encourages a child somewhere to spend more time practicing their reading skills and using their imagination, Wood will consider it a major success.
“Books are timeless,” Wood said. “To bring the joy of reading back into the curriculum and into a child’s learning development is priceless.”
Gambino agrees, and she’s looking forward to sharing a new book with the children in her life.
“I have younger siblings at home as well, and the youngest is nine months old,” she said. “Their childhood is so much different from with what they have technology-wise, so when I’m home, I’ve started to read them the books that I used to get read to me… hopefully, [reading] won’t become some lost thing that isn’t part of kid’s childhoods anymore. It’s just too valuable to lose.”
“Can You Laugh Like a Giraffe?” will be available for sale starting on Wednesday, December 11 through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.