Follow The Footprints With Johny Analysis

Personal Reflection

Introduction

Below is the review of my picture book titled “Follow The Footprints With Johny”. This book is written and illustrated by me and Alifeyah. It is classified under the genre of animal fantasy whereby the animals in this picture book can talk and engage in activities similar to a human. It is suitable for children between the age of 8 to 10.

Sypnosis

This story is about a young male beaver, named Johny who loves to play his tablet to the extent that he is addicted to it. He plays the tablet everywhere neglecting social interaction with his parents and the environment around him. One day, he sees dotted lines in his bedroom wall and a red crayon lying on the ground. He uses the red crayon and joins the dotted

Unlike children in the past, plays with toys such as rubrics and toy cars, children nowadays begin to play with their parent tablets from the time they can grasp an object in their hands. However, this brings negative effects upon children as they lack social interaction with the people and environment around them which causes them to feel sad and lonely. Children use the tablet to play games, surf the internet which is a one-way interaction with their tablet. Most parents are very concerned about this issue. Therefore, this picture book is created to encourage children to establish social interaction with people and engage in outdoor activities more often.

Text

In the front cover of the book, I chose to use big bold orange letters for the title. The colour orange radiates warmth and happiness. It relates to adventure and social communication stimulating two-way conversations. Orange, a warm and inviting colour is both physically and mentally stimulating, so it gets children excited to read the story.

The story was initially told using past-tense narration. However, after reading to the children, I found that they were not actively engaged in the story. Therefore, I modified the text to present-tense narration. This enables the children to believe that story events written are happening at the very moment

Simple sentence is used in the text. For example, “He plucks a flower and smells it.” After reading to the children I found that the simple sentence structure of the text allows them to read at ease thus developing their proficiency skills in reading English language.

In addition, the vocabulary used makes the text more appealing to young readers. The words used are more colourful than those usually used to describe a natural phenomenon. For example, Instead of using “water”, words like “Splish, Splash, Sploosh”was used when Johny is playing in the rain with his friends. This enables inexperienced or young children to have fun in reading as it is short and catchy.

Other than that, the text is placed at various places in every page. Sometimes the text is placed at the bottom of the page at the green grass, whereas sometimes the text is at the blue sky. This engages children in a fun and exciting reading process whereby after they read a sentence, they will look for the next