Why I Chose True Stories Over Fairy Tales for Children Learning to Read

The first day a child reads a sentence alone, with no one holding their hand on the page, something happens that is worth not wasting. It is real effort, made of letters slotting together slowly, of words rebuilding themselves one syllable at a time. And that effort deserves a reward that is not a fairy tale.

When I started working on Little Great Heroes, I asked myself a question that seemed simple and that ended up deciding everything else: what should a child find at the end of that effort? A true story, someone who actually lived, who did exactly what the book describes.

It is not a stylistic preference; it is a conviction about the value we give to children's time at that precise stage. Fiction has enormous power, and no one disputes that, but that power can wait. First reading, the one in which every sentence is a small climb, cannot.

A child reading that someone built a school where everyone said it could not be done is doing two things at once: decoding marks on a page, and discovering that the sentence describes something that actually happened, not something invented to make them dream. It is not a metaphor for courage: it is a fact. And I believe this difference, which to an adult might seem subtle, is enormous for a six-year-old, because it changes the way they look at what they are reading, and perhaps also what they think is possible for themselves.

This is why the language of the books is calibrated for children learning to read: short sentences, simple constructions, without subordinate clauses climbing one on top of another. But that simplicity must not empty out the content. A child making their first effort at reading, facing every sentence like a small climb, still deserves the whole truth, told in a way that can reach them on their own.

There is then a second part to this choice, one that concerns the people around the child at that moment. Every book in the series comes with free downloadable worksheets, designed to be used straight away, without whoever proposes them having to build a whole programme around them first. This is not an add-on tacked on at the end: it is part of the same idea. If a child discovers that the story is true, the natural next step is wanting to know more. The worksheets exist to catch that curiosity at the moment it is most alive, which is right after the last page.

Books for early reading exist; children's biographies exist; free teaching materials exist. Taken individually, these three elements are nothing new. What is new is putting them together in the same book, designed for children who are just starting to read. And that is why, every time someone writes to me that their child closed one of these books and asked "but is it true?", I know I made the right choice.