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Tales By You
Learning approach

A good story first, and a lesson only if it earns its place

Children can smell a lecture. Our default is a story worth rereading, with the learning carried by what happens rather than announced at the end.

Age bands

What changes when you change the child

Age is not a label on the cover. It changes sentence length, vocabulary, structure, and how much tension the story is allowed to hold.

Ages 2 to 4
  • Short sentences, strong rhythm, lots of repetition
  • One simple want, resolved gently and quickly
  • No real peril; the tension is a lost hat, not a lost child
Ages 5 to 7
  • Longer sentences with some new vocabulary in context
  • A small problem the child character solves themselves
  • Feelings named out loud, so they are easier to talk about
Ages 8 to 10
  • Chapters within the book, and a subplot to follow
  • Room for a mistake, a consequence, and a repair
  • Words a confident reader can decode without stopping
Reading together

The caregiver panel

Decades of reading research point at the same unglamorous conclusion: the conversation around the book matters more than the book.

So each spread has a collapsible panel with a couple of questions you can ask. It is collapsed by default, because sometimes a tired parent just wants to read the words and go to bed, and that is fine too.

See the reader
Questions you might be offered
  • What do you think happens on the next page?
  • Why do you think she did that?
  • Has anything like this happened to you?
  • What would you have done instead?
Representation

Children should recognise themselves

You describe your child, and we hold that description steady across every illustration in the book through a locked character design. Skin tone, hair, glasses, hearing aids, a wheelchair, a feeding tube — these are details of a person, not a special edition, and they should not drift between page three and page seven.

Families are described the way you tell us they are: one parent, two mums, grandparents raising grandchildren, foster and adoptive families, a parent who is deployed. None of these need to be the plot of the story. They can simply be true in the background, which is how children experience their own homes.