Book 4 of Kit's Little Sparks. From a engineer turned patent attorney and co-founder of a preschool.
Kit found a problem. Now what? Kit feels something. So does Sparks. So will your child. Frustrated. Curious. A little scared. A little proud. Kit names each feeling out loud, gives it a face, and shows your child that big inventors have big feelings, and that is exactly right.
The hardest skill in the inventor's mindset isn't building or sharing or even fixing. It's tolerating the feelings that come up between noticing a problem and solving it. Adult inventors call this "frustration tolerance." Preschool teachers call it "emotional regulation." Either way, it is the bridge between giving up and trying again, and children build it through stories and mirrors, not lectures.
Book 4 gives children five feelings, each tied to a moment in Kit's day. Each feeling has a face. Each face has a word. Each word has a body shape they can copy. By the end of the book, children have a tiny vocabulary for the very emotions that will determine whether they try again tomorrow.
Illustrated in warm watercolor. Toddler-safe board construction. Free read-along audio. Free educator guide that maps each feeling to age-appropriate co-regulation strategies for caregivers.
For parents working on emotional vocabulary at home. For preschool teachers running a feelings curriculum. For any caregiver who has watched a small child melt down at the kitchen table.
Written by Chris Kuczynski, an engineer for the first twelve years of his career, then a registered patent attorney, and a co-founder of a preschool. He wrote the Kit's Little Sparks series to give two to four year-olds the language of invention long before kindergarten.
Ask your child to name how Kit might be feeling on each spread, and why. Practice the feeling words together: happy, sad, frustrated, excited, proud. Book 5 is where Kit takes that feeling and starts to do something with it.
Kuczynski, Chris: - Chris Kuczynski has been building things since he was twelve. He earned his engineering degree from the University of Washington and spent the next twelve years as a working engineer before a new question took hold: how do you protect an idea so the world can benefit from it? That question led him to patent law, where he has spent over two decades helping inventors turn ideas into protected, world changing creations. In 2015, Chris co-founded a preschool, and something clicked. He watched toddlers do the exact same things his inventors did. They observed. They sketched (in crayon). They built, failed, rebuilt, and celebrated. The only difference was that nobody had told them what to call it yet. Kit's Little Sparks series of books is the result of those two worlds colliding. The series teaches children the social and emotional components of the inventors mindset and the foundations of inventing through play based storytelling. Each book introduces a new friend, a new challenge, and a new concept drawn directly from the patent process, all wrapped in watercolor illustrations and language designed for the smallest minds with the biggest ideas. Chris still takes things apart to see how they work.
