Wayzata resident Kate Shannon wrote her first book when she was 5, but it wasn’t until she had a child of her own that she wrote her second. She realized that there were good books for children, but they could be better. So she wrote Hey, Baby, Look!
The problem, Shannon says, is that many children simply listen as others read to them, without interaction. “If you have the intuition or training, you would know to turn the page and ask questions about the content, but many parents don’t know that,” she says. “The book we’ve created contains prompts to engage children in higher-level cognition and helps them learn to read meaning, not just words.”
Hey, Baby, Look!, published in 2014, has won 15 regional, national and international awards, including the Beverly Hills International Book Award for Children’s Nonfiction, the Indie Book Award for Children’s/Juvenile Nonfiction and the Gold Medal in the Children’s Picture Book (0-3 years) category at the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Awards.
It was the first book released by Shannon’s publishing company, Blue Dream Books, which she founded in 2009. Shannon says, as of now, she has another 26 children’s books that she’s written in the lineup for future release.
“What I know to be true is that when you’ve got little people sitting on your lap, sometimes time stops,” Shannon says. “It’s just the two of you and the rest falls away. One of my goals is to multiply those moments for other people.”
