Meet Allison Perkins-Caldwell, a proud Black entrepreneur and author from Chicago. With a passion for storytelling and a love for children, Allison creates captivating and educational tales that inspire young readers. Her books, set in the vibrant city of Chicago, celebrate diversity and teach valuable life lessons.

 

The current industry standard for children’s picture books is  500 words or less. As an educator entrusted with the care and intellectual development of students within her childcare centers, Allison grew disheartened with the quality of the stories she was exposing her students to. The content of those stories was reduced to the simplest words, the story directives “talking down” to the children. She noticed that many of her students were growing bored with the stories. She went looking for books that promoted intellectual dexterity in even the youngest audience and didn’t find them … so she decided to create them and share her vision with the world.  

 

The average story length of each book in the Phat Cat and the Family series is around 1,300 words. These long form picture books focus on strong, empowering narratives that don’t shy away from the use of advanced vocabulary. Allison believes in the innate intelligence and learning abilities of all children. Each book promotes context familiarity, elevates low, medium and high frequency vocabulary, and enhances learning models for plot comprehension and context retention.

In this age of short attention spans and technology that discourages long form reading and storytelling, the Phat Cat and the Family series pushes back with a novel approach to storytelling. This series engages all age groups. For the youngest learners, each book may be broken down into segments so that children can discus individual concepts, work on story retention, and anticipate what may happen next through group sharing and critical thinking. For independent readers, each book will cultivate attention as their minds are engaged and perspectives broadened.

 

There is a learning section at the end of each story that encourages young learners by diving deeper into substantive topics, as well as providing a vocabulary section that reinforces what they’ve learned in each story. Allison believes that the earlier children are exposed to various frequency words, the more engrained and elevated vocabulary is retained.    

Join Phat Cat and the Family on a journey of self-discovery, friendship, and adventure as Allison Perkins-Caldwell takes children on a magical literary ride of cross-situational learning and cognitive elevation.