Written by: Patricia Billings & Fatih Erdoğan co-wrote : Love, Sharing, and Friends books. These were then translated by unnamed translators. 

Patricia Billings wrote the Empathy (Spanish) book herself in English, and it was translated by an unnamed translator.

Illustrated by: Manuela Gutierrez Montoya

For ages: infant and up 

Language: English & Portuguese (Sharing), Spanish (Empathy), Italian (Love), French (Friends).

Topics Covered: Social-Emotional Learning, Language, Multilingual Learning, POC-Centric Narratives. 

Summary: 

These board books are absolutely lovely!  The illustrations are beautifully diverse and have simple storylines that keep the books from feeling like they are just vocabulary books.  The same characters are present in all 4 of the books we read, and I enjoy this continuity.    I believe they are all students in the same classroom!

These would be a great addition for language learning and social-emotional learning.  There are some lines that can be used to branch off into other conversations about different lived experiences, such as when a character knows her friend was a refuge, and that made her sad and scared (empathy) or another one knows that he should conserve water (sharing).  These simple statements are so nice to see in a board book, so readers can have these conversations and knowledge from a young age!

These books were sent to us by Patricia, but all opinions are our own.  You can check out more language books made by Milet Publishing here. Not sponsored, there’s just a ton more languages available than the ones we reviews!

About the Author & the Illustrator:

Patricia Billings is the author of all 4 of these books! Her Instagram biography says she is a “publisher, author, wisdom worker, vegan, and present in NYC”.

Fatih Erdoğan (Izmir, 23 April 1954) can best be described as a pioneer of children’s literature in
Turkey. He finished high school in Robert College and graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Department of Boğaziçi University.  In 1980, he founded Mavibulut Publishing
 House, which is the first publishing house in Turkey that focuses exclusively on children’s literature. The same year, his first book Pan ve Çiçeği (Pan and His Flower) received the Best Picture Book Award given by the Association of Librarians. Since then, he wrote 64 children’s books and illustrated many of them himself. Today he is one of the most popular children’s authors in Turkey and his books were sold over 800.000 copies.

Manuela Gutierrez Montoya is the illustrator of all 4 of the books we received, but we cannot find anything about her online!