How Cambridge author Anita Lehmann’s picture book helps children settle into school

Ever wondered how your child is coping with starting school – I mean really coping? Well a new picture book put together by a team of University of Cambridge psychologists and local author and mother-of-three Anita Lehmann aims to help parents become aware of how their children are feeling during this life-changing time.

It takes parents a year to ‘tune in’ to their child’s feelings about starting school, says a major Cambridge-led study, which led to the creation of How I Feel About My School: A Story to Identify and Reflect on Children’s Emotions.

Published by Routledge at the end of April, this eye-catching tome, with beautiful illustrations by Karin Eklund, is based on findings from the Ready or Not Study led by Prof Claire Hughes at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, with help from Dr Elian Fink and others. Claire is also a fellow of Newnham College.

Anita Lehmann, an award-winning author of 12 fiction and non-fiction books for both children and adults, says: “The picture book was developed in collaboration with Cambridge University, with Claire Hughes.

“Claire and her team from the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research did a study on children’s experience in the first year of school – so reception and then year one – and they found a massive discrepancy between what parents thought how their children were doing and how the children were actually experiencing school.

“So some children were having a bit of anxiety when leaving their parents, but then had an absolutely fine day at school.

“But the parents thought that the child was really suffering because they were crying at the gate, stuff like that.

“And other parents thought their child was just fine when really they were having really big problems at school, or were really unhappy, didn’t eat at lunchtime, things like that.

“So the picture book was developed with them in order to foster conversations and to get children to talk about their feelings, to get them to share, but also to foster conversations between teachers and carers and parents and children – just to engage them in communication about emotions.”

The complicated subject of emotions is one that looms large throughout the book.

“Often children’s emotional vocabulary is really quite limited,” explains Anita, who is originally from Bern in Switzerland.

“Children are happy or sad, they’re the words they know and it stops there – and the idea is to really enrich the vocabulary for children as well. So we made this picture book with that in mind.”

The book focuses on the experiences of four different children during a typical school day.

“It’s a bit of a Where’s Wally? type of picture book,” notes Anita, “in the sense that you can find all the children in all the big illustrations, and each of them will go through a slightly difficult moment in their day.

“So one child will find the loud noise of the school quite overwhelming, another child will fall over in the playground and feel quite shy…

“Another one will be pushed over at the lunch queue, and another one her pencils keep breaking so she gets frustrated…

“It’s very much ‘This is what’s happening, how would you handle the situation?’ – ideas to really encourage conversation, and to accompany these four kids through the school day.

“Then in the other spreads, you see all the children have got through a slightly difficult moment, at other times they are perfectly happy.

“So it’s also this idea that emotions fluctuate and change and just because you’re sad now doesn’t mean that you’re going to be sad in five hours time.

“Again, it is just to foster communication between children and their carers and teachers.”

Anita, whose various awards include the Geneva Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the Winchester Literary Festival Prize for Flash Fiction, notes that Professor Hughes had been working with Karin Eklund “for quite a few years”.

“Claire approached Karin with this idea and Karin suggested me as a co-author.” she says, “Claire got some funding and we sat together with Karin and came up with the concept.”

Anita reveals that How I Feel About My School has been featured in Newsweek, and Claire also discussed it at the Cambridge Literary Festival in April.

“She talked about her research into children starting school,” observes Anita, “and it [the book] is really about helping children settle into school.”

How I Feel About My School is available now, priced £11.19, from tinyurl.com/3fdwxft6.

A Cambridge resident for eight years now, having previously lived in the city from 2005-2011, before moving back to Geneva, Anita also offers creative writing courses.

She has published several children’s books, including 50 Amazing Swiss Immigrants, The Geneva Chronicles, Slobber Slobber Kiss Kiss, and Zanna and the Something.

Her next book, The Big Book of Pi: The Famous Number You Can Never Know, is due out next year.

For more on Anita or her writing courses, visit anita-lehmann.com.

For more on Prof Claire Hughes and the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research, visit cfr.cam.ac.uk.