A Coloring Book based on your child's own life: At water break of our soccer classes we read a chapter from our original art, illustrated Soccer Storybook. We thought it would be really fun for the children to have a coloring book that was based on their own experience rather than a by-product of the latest animated movie or Saturday morning cartoon.

Real Life Issues: Too often, the content of storybooks for young children is divorced from the rich experiences of the real world that shape a child's thinking and personality. Plots consist of fantasy adventures and characters are represented as animals.

We developed a storybook that drew on the developmental issues we observed from working with young children in our classes. These stories verbalize some of the feelings and thoughts that are part of growing up. Life presents all of us, from the time we are young, with a series of challenges, and we develop as we learn how to think about and solve these issues. It was time to have a storybook for children that reflects the richness of real life.

The stories cover a range of issues (some serious, some funny) faced by young children engaged in physical activity - from following a dare to not liking sweat, from fear of failure to avoiding goose poop. Our characters are realistic looking children that the child hearing the story and looking at the illustrations can identify with and root for.

Imaginative and Fun-Loving - like the children: We also wanted to avoid preaching morality lessons to young children in some adult-like, serious tone that loses the fun loving and imaginative energy that we see in these children all the time. So while our characters are always realistic children faced with a variety of real world issues, we celebrate the fun and imaginative dimension of young children throughout the stories and illustrations.

Make Reading Fun - and Children will Read: We have always maintained that the most fundamental issue in the physical development of young children was to make the experience fun - so that they would enjoy it and want to repeat the experience. The same principle holds true with reading - if young children enjoy the stories and the pictures and the process of being read to - they will learn to love stories and books, and they will learn to read with enthusiasm.

Original art sketches: The coloring book uses the original sketches that artist Leo Winstead drew in preparation for the watercolor illustrations used in the Soccer Storybook. The childen like this 'real art' alot more than the simple, cheap to produce, block drawings found in most coloring books. What fun for the children to color in the same images they have shown to them in class!