MARA WONDER
My son is four. I’m Italian, and my husband and I decided to raise him with English and Spanish alongside our own language. We found him a bilingual preschool — but preschool is only a few hours, and a language is really learned at home, in the moments when a child doesn’t notice they’re learning.
Watching him, I noticed something. A word stayed with him when it was attached to something he already recognized: a dinosaur he’d seen in a cartoon, a fish from a game. The picture was the bridge, and the word climbed up on top of it by itself.
That’s where these books came from. Every page does two things at once. The useful one: letters, the names of things, the care it takes to color inside a shape, learning to see where a drawing ends. And the good one: choosing the colors, deciding what color a feeling is.
I couldn’t find books that did that. So I started drawing them — first for my son, and then for the other parents who were looking for the same thing.
One drawing. One English word.
That is the whole method.
The Collection
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Christmas
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Dinosaur
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Farm Animals
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Halloween
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Ocean Animals
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Rocky Mountains
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Savannah
No books match that combination.
"The world is a book. And who did not travel through it - read only one page in it."
Adam Sendler
Meet Numo
He’s soft, sand-colored, and he turns up wherever a child has already been — the kitchen table, the classroom, the park on the way home.
His books are about feelings, and about the ordinary afternoons where feelings actually happen. The nervous first morning at a new school. The argument over a swing. The quiet that comes after.
A child recognizes the place before they can name the feeling. That’s what gives the feeling somewhere to land.
