✦ THE STORYKEEPER’S ALMANAC ✦
What story does your child
need right now?
An almanac tells you what to plant right now. This one tells you what to read.Three questions. No email. 49 stories on the shelf.
Who are we reading to?
Start with their age. It is the answer that changes the most.
✦ THREE QUESTIONS ✦
- 1.How old they are, to the year.
- 2.What is going on in your house right now.
- 3.What you would want them to feel at the end.
Then it turns to a page and tells you why that one.
HOW OLD ARE THEY?
We ask for the exact year, not a range. A four-year-old and an eight-year-old need different books even when the cover says “4–8”.
Why we ask for an exact age
Almost every children’s book, including ours, prints a wide age range on the cover. It is a marketing range, and it is the wrong thing to choose a book with. “Ages 4 to 8” covers a story where two siblings have to work out why each one’s business failed without the other — and a story where a child gives a scary shadow polka-dot underpants. Those are not the same reader.
So every story on our shelf carries a second, narrower range: the ages its arc actually lands in, set by what the story asks a child to do. Notice your own thinking? That is nearer seven than five. Decide now on behalf of the version of yourself who will be standing in the doorway at ten o’clock? Six. Copy a rabbit shaking off a fright? Three. The Almanac scores against that range, and it tells you where your child sits inside it.
It also tells you when we have nothing good. Our books are verse picture books, so they are centred between 2 and 10; at the edges of that the Almanac says so plainly and points you at a custom story instead of dressing up a near-miss.
Would rather just browse?
The whole shelf is one click away, sorted by what each book is for.
Wander the Story Glade