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All You Need Is Love: Celebrating Families of All Shapes and Sizes ISBN: 9781785922510
Collins, Shanni and Knightsmith, Pooky
Published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017
Ten story/poems about ten different kinds of family, each one a viable unit because of shared love and understanding. Each two page spread gives us a picture of a family on the left side and the poem on the right. The illustrations are a combination of photos and joyful, imaginative drawings that add greatly to the text opposite. The first poem and picture is about a mother and her Down's syndrome daughter; the second introduces a boy being fostered by two dads; the third reverses this by giving us a boy with two mums, one of which was his birth mum. He has a lovely dog he calls his 'hairy sister'! Then there is a family with a dad who is 'poorly', another with a girl who becomes a boy, and another with a boy and a girl, one of whom is adopted and one who isn't. There is a set of grandparents who are mum and dad because the parents have died, and a set of twins, one of whom uses a wheelchair. In the penultimate story/poem there is a white dad and a mum who is 'rich brown'; the little girl is 'the colour of toffee'. All of these stories are summed up at the end in 'Your Family' where we learn that every family is different and that 'Love is what matters, it's warm like the sun. Take time to notice your people, one by one...' The scansion isn't always perfect, but the ideas are spot on, and children in an unusual family will find great reassurance in recognising that their situation is not so different from others. Pooky Knightsmith, a child mental health and well-being adviser, has added a 'Guide for Supporting Adults', four pages of advice for teachers and parents on how to use the book. An excellent, positive resource on diversity in families. Available from Amazon, good book shops and from the publisher: www.jkp.com.
Age: 6+