What if your next children's book didn't have a set storyline but rather settings to tell limitless stories? Instead of rereading the same book for the 100th time, what if there were new adventures to be had every time you opened it? Let me introduce you to Collaborative Story Books
As we work towards making this a reality, join our update email list.
Sort of like a choose your own adventure book, it is a create your own adventures together using the inspirations and settings from the book. With 15 setting pages of hand drawn art by Madeleine Blakely, you can start on any page and continue to any page you want. Sort of like choose your own adventure books, but create your own adventures! Imagine worlds and endless stories together with your little ones.
Stories are the most impactful things in our lives. It is how we learn we can make change, overcome obstacles, and understand who we are. Let's begin helping our littles ones become incredible storytellers who know they can change the world.
Madeleine Blakely
Madeleine Blakely of Madeleine Illustrated is our amazing artist. Madeleine’s illustrations are all hand drawn with color pencils and bring so much depth and curiosity to the book. There are even hidden symbols and tons of possible plot points hidden in each page for you and your story telling companions to find and use in your stories.
Hi, I'm Chris, and I love telling stories with my toddler. They are so quick to add fun characters, creative solutions and the wildest ideas. I also love playing tabletop role playing games and telling collaborative stories with my friends. The idea for Collaborative Story Books came from a combination of the two.
As grownups, we may read books before we put our child to bed or down for a nap, or even just a good snuggle time. And there are many amazing children's books with incredible art, stories, characters, and beautiful lessons being made. But the drive for us to tell our own stories birthed something new, a children's book without a set story, but rather all the space and inspiration to tell YOUR stories.
We have been telling our "Dragon Story" for a long time now with just our imaginations, but I teased my idea of having settings to tell our story in one night and it was such a hit, I knew we had to make it.
As we work towards making this a reality, join our update email list.
And don't worry grown ups, we have pages just for grown ups to help you with tons of ways to explore the book together. From story prompts, adventure templates and more; we will make sure you are ready to engage with the best storytellers in the world, children.
For us grownups, using our imagination can be a challenging thing, as we have forgotten how to use those metaphorical muscles. CS Lewis said “But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.”
The "Pages for Grownups" serve to help guide you as this might be something you haven’t done in awhile. These pages help give you beginning steps to start a story, even some example prompts of how you might include something that happened in your child(ren)'s life that day that they might need help processing.
And then, we have a "Read this together your first time" page. Here we lay out the premises of the book for the whole family, helping you collectively decide your characters and give you an opening prompt to begin.
