Children's Educational Books
Hilary L. Lawrence
I grew up in Scotland in a little village called Killearn with my sister, three brothers and our family dog, Skye
Here is a picture of my little brother and me walking home after school.
Each day when I came home, our house was always full of children because my mother was a child minder, which meant she looked after other people's children until they got home from work. Naturally, I would spend hours playing with them all, making up games, plays and other forms of entertainment, which often included reading.
Dad was a tech entrepreneur, and Mum was also a great cook, so there was always something delicious simmering on the stove or baking in the oven.
After I finished school and graduated from Edinburgh University I met my husband Tom, the love of my life.
We moved to Bermuda ,a beautiful island in the Sargasso sea, and had three wonderful girls, Sarah, Sophie and Susannah. I have tried to recreate the same warmth and energy at home, along with a similar structure for learning.
Tom and I have been married for nearly twenty years. We love to travel together and have lived in several countries. Our favourite thing to do is travel and explore the world with our girls, which we try to do whenever we can. We love understanding different cultures and learning new life lessons. This is a picture of us giving a bath to an elephant in Thailand.
When the girls were young we would read books before bed and they particularly loved rhyming picture books, which always held their attention. We have had a lot of fun inventing silly rhymes to go with our favourite morals and proverbs. One day I wrote a few of my ideas down and thought they would make fun picture books.
Proverbs, morals and idioms are passed down in all societies from generation to generation. (An idiom is a saying that has a different meaning to the individual words, for example "Loose lips sink ships", does not mean if you gossip a ship will sink, but rather that careless talk should be avoided. This phrase was first used during World War 2. Morals such as "The grass is greener on the other side", date back more than two thousand years!) I really wanted to bring these messages to life by transforming them into fun stories with vibrant illustrations, so that I could explain the meanings of the sayings in simple terms that children like my own would understand.
It is in Bermuda that I met Katherine, who illustrates the stories. Her daughter was in the same year as my daughter at a school called BHS. Katherine has an incredible imagination. We have had some great fun working together bringing life to the stories. My favourite character is the elegant fairy she created for "The Grass is Not Greener." The fairy magically changes a bunny she meets into a snake, a bee, an elephant and a salmon for a day. What do you think she discovers?
