I should be honest about who is selling you this.
I am not a children's author. I trained as a chemist. I have started businesses that failed, in mothballs, in wine importing, in a technology company that was roughly five years too early, and I could keep going but you have things to do. I got to seventy having written one memoir and one novel, neither of them for children.
So the reasonable question is what I am doing here.
The thing you notice late
At a certain age you stop asking what you have built and start noticing what has actually been passed on.
Very little of it turns out to be the businesses. What got passed on, in my family, was a handful of sayings, a few stories told at a table, and a set of expectations about how you behave that nobody ever sat down and taught. It arrived sideways, in stories, from people who were not trying to teach anything.
That is the mechanism I wanted to get at. Not "children should learn values", which is a sentence nobody argues with and nobody acts on. The specific machinery: how does a thing get into a child and stay there for sixty years.
Fables are the answer, and they are not mine
The form is two and a half thousand years old and it works because it does the one thing that instruction cannot. Something happens, an animal does it, it goes wrong, the end. Nobody explains anything. There is no adult inside the story telling anyone what to think.
A child argues with a fable. They cannot argue with a lecture, they can only endure it.
What I added
Rhyme, because rhyme is a container and it holds the words in order. Songs, because a child will sing a thing they will not sit through. Twenty-six of them, one per letter, because the alphabet gave me a fixed shape and a fixed shape is why the work got finished.
None of that is original. All of it is old machinery, reassembled by somebody who spent his working life in laboratories and learned to respect a method that already works.
The disadvantage of being seventy
I will say it before somebody else does. I am not the demographic. I am not on the platforms where children's books are discovered, my instincts about what is fashionable are forty years out of date, and there are people doing this who understand the market far better than I do.
The advantage
I have watched the whole arc. I have seen which of the things done to children took, and which did not, over a span long enough to actually know.
And I have no career to protect. Nobody at seventy writes a children's book to advance anything. I wrote it because I wanted the twenty-six words to exist in one place, in rhyme, with a tune, before I stopped.
That is the honest sales pitch. The set is $49.95 during the launch, and if that is not for you, the twenty-six colouring posters are free and always will be.