Inching Our Way On The Startup Obstacle Course

A Wonderful Humbling Experience!

We got an opportunity to read one of our stories at a montessori school today. This was the perfect opportunity for us. 
To get real reactions from our target audience is very essential in validating our stories and product. Honestly, when we signed up for it, we had no clue what was to come.


It was a summer session about whales and sharks. The children in this group had already spent 2 weeks learning about sharks and whales and a lot of other aquatic animals. We have a story about saving a whale from a deadly oil spill in the ocean. We thought it would be the perfect story to end this class.


I arrived on time for the story presentation and got a chance to look around the classroom to see what they were learning about. I was shocked (pleasantly) to see the amount of information that these children were already assimilating. The anatomy of a whale was part of their class work. I was highly encouraged. Our whale story did need the children to understand how a whale breathes. After I browsed around, I needed to step up my presentation a bit.


Come circle time, I decided to go around the circle and ask each child about their favorite sea creature... The responses really left me astounded (considering these were 4 or 5 year olds)
- Great white shark
- Sting ray
- Manatees
- Harbor Porpoise
- Toothed Whales


I also posed a question to figure out if anyone recently heard about an oil spill. Spat came another answer that really shook my bearings.
- "oh yeah in the Gulf of Mexico" ( followed by - we might be going to Mexico soon)
- "yes I know its the BP oil spill - there was a big explosion"


During the entire story telling process, the children not only enlightened me but also left me feeling very humbled and hopeful for the future of our world. Some of the wonderful pearls of wisdom that were shared during this time are listed below.
"we must care for our oceans"
"The act of the whale jumping is called breaching"
"Baleen whales have two blow holes"


After a round of applause and thank-yous, I decided that it was me who should thank these children for the most intellectually rewarding 20 minutes of my life. I left overcome with humility. But most of all this exercise taught me one thing, I am on the right path. 


I have been challenged several times about the concepts in some of the books being too advanced for 2 to 5 year olds. However, after this experience if there is one thing I have learnt it is that there is nothing too advanced for a 4 year old!!

Ishaan and Tricy's Zoo Trip

How often have you caught your little toddler hold up a block of wood or a rock or a crumpled piece of paper and pretend that it was a spaceship or a flying horse or a zooming airplane? A zillion times might not be an exaggerated response, I believe.

Pretend Play is such an important part of growing up. In the formative years of their life, children have the power to visualize and imagine things that often beat our realistic, rational thought processes. As adults, we kill our imagination to live up to the practical demands of the trite world that we have built around ourselves. But childhood is different. We have the license to dream and cook up our own stories and build our own imaginary, whimsical worlds. That is a license that every child has and fully deserves.

When a child dreams that he has flown into his imaginary world to meet with his favorite imaginary characters, it is a dream that encourages role-play and thus his emotional development. When a child puts together a few blocks and builds a rocket ship and enacts its take off, its an activity that encourages his creative thinking skills and his language skills. When a child pretends to be an animal rescuer and runs about trying to fix problems that different animals from his toy box are facing, it encourages the development of his analytical and problem solving skills. Thus, pretend play is central to a child's over all development.

At PicUrTale, this has been our observation from dealing with children in this age group. Hence, we have decided to focus on enabling this wonderful activity by providing a means for the children to really be a part of their imaginary worlds.

Ishaan and Tricy's Zoo Trip was a story that developed in the course of one such pretend play session. A little boy named Ishaan, picked out a few toys from his toy box - A dinosaur, A little boy and a zooming car and said "Mommy, my dino wants to go to the Zoo". Why not???

That's how that story was born.

Ishaan and Tricy's Zoo Trip teaches via pretend-play the differences between the prehistoric dinosaur world and our current world. Children learn about different wild animals and experience the thrill of visiting them in the zoo. They even learn about the cries of the various animals.

We encourage you to preview this book in our book shelf.

http://www.picurtale.com/PreviewZT

It's a wonderful read ... Participate with your child in imagining himself in the zoo with a dinosaur. Act silly and imitate the animal sounds. At the end of the story, we promise you will learn a thing or two along with your child.

Happy Reading!! Happy Pretend Playing!!

Hello World

June 20^th 2010, after an intense labor of love, passion and a confluence of like minded energies, PicUrTale was born. Yes you can now find us online! An alpha release of the website can be found at:

http://www.PicUrTale.com

Join us and an array of amusing characters that have been specifically created to entertain and educate your child.

Our philosophy is nothing groundbreaking. Infact, it is just a reinforcement of what we observe in our daily lives as parents. It is an endorsement of a simple, tried-and-true theory that children thrive on attention and importance. PicUrTale offers you a platform to leverage this understanding and use it to educate while you entertain your child with stories that they star in. Personalized with their picture and name, our stories offer a compelling environment to jumpstart – early creativity, early learning and early reading. Our stories are meant to bolster the confidence of young minds by realizing their dreams of becoming a star. PicUrTale aims at mixing a wee bit of reality into our imaginative tales.

The stories in our book library are picked very carefully. They go through careful review and dissection. Each story has to fit the essence of our philosophy.

• First and foremost, each of the stories is written with the intent of rendering higher value by the virtue of your child featuring in them. Our stories are meant to offer more meaning once personalized. Your children can almost teleport themselves into the book and be a real part of the entire learning process. Most of our stories are based on input and feedback from other parents.
  
  
• Our stories are meant for educating children while being fun and we want them to be accessible to as many people as possible. Keeping this in mind, we have tried to bring down the cost our books. We envisage that these books won’t be just novelty items that could only be given out as special gifts, but, these books should find a way into your home libraries for the reason of imparting quality educative value to your children. Thus, we will always strive to keep the books affordable.
  
  
• Finally, each of our stories is written with a lot of love and passion, with our target goal in mind. Our books have an organic and natural way of storytelling, just like any parent would. Our stories are meant to indulge your sensibilities and ensure a warm security of knowing that your child is learning something in the most instinctive way.

We have tried our best to honor our philosophy and principles. Our greatest honor would be if we could have PicUrTale books as a part of every household, contributing to the routine learning and laughter in your homes.

So join PicUrTale in celebrating your child!

Please visit us at http://www.picurtale.com to browse through our stories and to learn more about our books and products. This is the alpha release of our website and hence we only have one story that is available to buy. But very soon there will be a good selection to choose from. So Follow Us!!

http://www.facebook.com/picurtale

http://www.twitter.com/picurtale