A Carlisle author has penned her first children's book - which addresses the challenges little ones have had to face due to the pandemic.
Rebecca Tyson, who has been honing ideas to support children’s mental health and wellbeing throughout her 15-year career working as a nursery nurse, hopes the book will help heal children's worries coming out of the Covid period.
Flamingo Flockdown is about a special group of flamingo friends who 'share their feelings, work through their worries and see the very best in each other... whilst providing the opportunity for readers to reflect on the many difficult situations we've seen over the past two years'.
Rebecca said she has many flamingo tales she wants to share but as the pandemic hit, it made sense that this would be her first release.
"The Flamingo Friends are a group of characters who each have their own individual personalities and traits," she said.
"Through these stories, I want to help children realise and understand it's okay for everyone to have their unique differences.
"For example, Maria is a worrier, but her worrying is a recognised feeling that we all experience so it’s great to be talked about. Flavia is very confident and Freddie extremely shy - I hope I can elaborate on the friends’ differences in future stories, including how (on closer inspection) they all look wonderfully different too.
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"My original idea was based around flamingos being very social animals, they are always together and live together in such large groups. They put their heads together to help each other work things out.
"When the pandemic happened, I thought that was the end of the idea, we couldn’t even see each other let alone put our heads together but then I realised, there was a story within the Flamingo Friends about this – they needed to manage their way through the lockdown too," she said.
The Flamingos have been brought to colourful life through local animation company Plus 3k Studios, with the help of creative director, Lou Neath.
"Lou ensured each of the characters were a true visual representation of how I saw them. It was important to capture the quirks of each character and there were many beak tweaks along the way but together we have produced a gorgeous group of fun, friendly birds," she said.
Rebecca is on the hunt to find stockists shelves to home her flamingo friends so that's readily available for the public.
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