Writing Tips from Children's Authors Heath Rhoades and Dawn Menge

I'm excited to be hosting children's authors Heath Rhoades and Dawn Menge on this the fourth day of their virtual book tour with The National Writing for Children Center!

Heath and Dawn are the authors of Queen Vernita Meets Sir HeathyBean the Astronomer. Find out more about the book and the authors at the National Writing for Children Center.

Writing Tips from Heath Rhoades

I think one of the big lessons I have learned through this process is that you really need to understand your audience. It seems that maybe I overshot the age group a bit in the content of the book. In order to fit with in the format created by Dawn Menge in her series, I attempted to provide a lot of different topics in a very short format. In the future for this age group I would certainly rethink that. However, the desire to write to a higher age group has come out of this project and research is being done now for my next book, which will target teen to young adults.

Writing Tips from Dawn Menge

The structure of the award winning Queen Vernitas Series picture book seris is based on the researched methods of rote learning. Rote learning has an important place in the educational community. The use of rote learning is a productive method of teaching and learning for facts that can be learned in sequence and do not require higher processing methods such as application and synthesizing. Rote learning memorization is applicable for teaching in learning when used with short sets of concepts such as days of the weeks and months of the year. The predicatable structured format of the series contributes to the ease of writing each book. The reader has a format that is dependable and thereby decreases the anxieties for the new learner as they develop their skills.

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Thanks for the tips, ladies!

More information about the book can be found on Outskirt Press.