Curious young (and not so young) minds will love the Start Small Think Big series from Mama Makes Books.

Each title takes a closer look at something small and recognisable to children from nature and shares how it fits within much larger systems.  Broken down and beautifully illustrated,  each book is enticing and full of facts that will help children better understand the natural world.  These titles make a great addition to lifecycles (or natural cycles in the case of a raindrop) Key Stage 1 topic boxes.  Mama Makes Books have also produced extensive teaching resources which you can find at the bottom of the page.

Author Mary Auld and illustrator Dawn Cooper of Start Small Think Big: Fluffy Flying Seed have very kindly shared with us how they produced this title and why they love it…

Author of the Start Small, Think Big series, Mary Auld talks about her inspiration for the series

I have always been fascinated by the small things: a tiny seed, a sparkling rain drop, a small, speckled egg, not just because they are beautiful to look at but also because they are a great beginning. Starting somewhere very small can take you somewhere very big – it’s a bit like writing your full address – so your home, your street, your town, your county, your country … and ending up with the universe. It is all interconnected – and most importantly – something you are part of!

It was because of this fascination that I came up with the idea for Start Small, Think Big. It was exciting for me to research but also tied in with a basic principle of learning – to start with something familiar and expand on it. Working with the series’ publisher (Mama Makes Books), we chose to focus on child-friendly things from the natural world that had some kind of cycle built into them – often a life cycle but also natural cycles, such as the water cycle.

I structured my story for each book around this cycle – and my research began there, taking books from the library and looking online. I learnt so much and had to think big myself to work out how and when to include all the amazing details. It was useful to have the big fold-out at the end of the book to add a few of them, but my favourite facts are all incorporated into the different stories: how a colony of Arctic terns falls silent before they migrate – a silence called a ‘dread’; how corals only spawn (give out the cells needed to make new coral) at night on a full moon once a year; how Brazil nut trees rely on a rodent called an agouti to spread (and bury) their nuts around the rainforest so new trees can grow.

In the case of Fluffy, Flying Seed, I just loved the fact that a plant most people think of as a weed (it’s actually a wildflower) plays such an important part in feeding other animals and keeping habitats healthy. Since writing it, I have come up with a new collective term for a group of dandelions – maybe you have heard of flock of birds, but how about a delight of dandelions?

However, the facts I find are not just explained by my words. It is the illustrations that really bring them to life and I have been incredibly lucky to work with some not only very talented but also very knowledgeable and enthusiastic illustrators (just read Dawn Cooper’s blog, who illustrated Little, Brown Nut and Fluffy, Flying Seed, to see this). This means when I write, I have to think visually too. How will my words work with the pictures? How will the pictures work with my words? Sometimes this is challenging (how do you picture something you can’t see?) but sometimes it is just wonderful – you don’t have to describe all the life in a spring meadow, you can just show it. As a non-fiction writer, it is this clever and sometimes magical combination of words and pictures that really makes all my work rewarding.  I hope people will get as much pleasure reading Start Small, Think Big as I had researching and writing it.

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Illustrator of two of the books in the Start Small, Think Big series – Fluffy, Flying Seed and Little, Brown Nut, Dawn Cooper talks about her art

I was super excited when I was approached by Mama Makes Books to illustrate Fluffy, Flying Seed, my second book in their Start Small, Think Big series, not only because I had such a lovely time illustrating Little, Brown Nut, but because I am ever keen to champion the humble dandelion. Dandelions have a bit of reputation for being an unsightly garden weed, a target for the lawn mower, but they are one of the most undervalued and successful wildflowers in history, and we only have to look at their phenomenal lifecycle to understand their brilliance and appreciate their sunny yellow faces and globular fluffy seed heads, which appear in our gardens, parks and many more unusual places, which you’ll discover in Fluffy, Flying Seed.  Dandelions are an incredibly important early food source for pollinators like bees and butterflies, which play a fundamental role in our lives.  Dandelions also provide welcome snacks to larger foragers like deer and rabbits.  It was a joy to illustrate so many creatures, from bees to moths, to snails and foxes, who all play a role in the dandelion’s lifecycle.

I use an iPad to illustrate these busy scenes, drawing directly onto the screen much like I would with paper and pencil, which allows me to zoom in and create lots of detail in my drawings.  I enhance the colours on my laptop and add my own handmade textures to give the drawings a warmer feel.

Illustrating non-fiction books for children can be a challenge, because I want to represent everything as accurately as possible, whilst making children want to reach for the books and dive in.  As part of the series style, I aimed to make the animals look fairly realistic, but with a generous helping of cuteness to really appeal to young readers.  The colours I gravitated towards were warm and meadow bright, which I think gives the book a nice cohesive feel, in between wonderful nighttime scenes which really make the ghostly white flowers pop on the page.

While I was working on the book over the winter months, there was an absence of real dandelions to draw inspiration from, but Mama Makes Books provided me with some captivating time lapse videos of dandelion seeds germinating in soil, sprouting into ungainly plants with enormous leaves, before transforming into beautiful golden flowers and eventually into magical looking white globes, which Mary Auld describes beautifully in the book as a ‘golden-sun flower’ changing into a ‘fluffy, full moon’.  These videos were really fun to watch while I was drawing the various stages of growth.

I hope this book helps readers of all ages to appreciate the importance of the wonderful dandelion, and that it might even tempt a few into picking a fluffy, white ‘dandelion clock’ and spreading its seeds far and wide to sprout new dandelions in all manner of unlikely places.  I, for one, am curious to try some dandelion wine…

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Do check out this series – you can see all the titles and teaching resources below including Small Sparkling Raindrop which is the most recent title.  Find school specific discounts on each title and keep an eye out in Summer 2 for an opportunity to get all 5 in the series at a very special price.

Many thanks again to Mary and Dawn for sharing their Start Small Think Big insight with us!