In a co-design process, two picture books were designed together with the children of a two-group kindergarten and me. The main pedagogical goals of this project were to support the children’s autonomy, to make transparent the individual steps in the creation of a picture book and especially to encourage the children’s creativity.
After each child presented a story line, each group voted on which story line and protagonists to choose for the picture book. The story line was sketched together, after which the children began to draw the images for the story. Together it was decided which pictures were assigned to which text passages.
The process of digitizing the images, such as scanning or photographing them, creating the book on the PC as typing the text was also carried out partly autonomously by the children and partly with my support. The books were printed, and afterwards a meeting was held with the children to reflect on the co-design process, during which the children gave very positive feedback on it. The books have become works of art, which the children and their parents were very happy about.
