How do you make learning fun and engaging for children? This is the question at the heart of edutainment – the portmanteau word for the kind of literature and media where educational content is blended into an entertaining format.
With the release of Have You Seen Miss Zuri’s Magical Shoes? One can surmise that this is a question that Ayikwa, a new Nigerian publisher focusing on children’s books, is preoccupied with as well. Penned by the mononymous storyteller Oluchi, the picture book weaves hard facts into a tapestry of playful storytelling that is bound to captivate the 4 to 8 age group.
Her left shoe is red, her right one is green.
These shoes are unlike any you’ve seen.
“I’ll give them a whirl,” she says with a grin,
She turns around and begins to spin.
Thanks to a pair of enchanted footwear, Miss Zuri is able to transform into various animals, serving up elementary biology lessons in the process.
While traditionally targeted at children, picture books can be enjoyed by adults too, and this is no exception. For the millennials, Miss Zuri is likely to jolt them with a dose of nostalgia as she echoes Ms. Frizzle, the eccentric teacher from the popular nineties children’s television series, The Magic School Bus (itself an adaptation of the eponymous book series by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen), famed for taking her pupils on science-inspired but magical and fun-filled field trips.
Can Miss Zuri foster in Gen Alpha and Beta a love for science just as Ms. Frizzle did for their parents? There is an opportunity here for educators nationwide to incorporate this book into the curriculum as a creative supplement that could help introduce or reinforce scientific concepts to children, not to mention helping them build up their language skills. Oluchi’s narrative is teeming with powerful verbs and rich adjectives that would arm any young reader with an impressive vocabulary. The decision to anchor the story in rhyme not only endears it to both audible and soundless reading, but makes it memorable as well.
Unfortunately, with an uneven meter and just as many near rhymes as actual rhyming words, the scansion is far from perfect. While this may put off poetry purists, it is passable for the nursery rhyme crowd. I also found myself wishing the author had opted for a first-person plural point of view. A high frequency of ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’ in the text would have offered young readers a more immersive experience than the impersonal and somewhat distancing third-person point of view she has chosen.
On the bright side, expressive cartoons from Italian illustrator Erica Cocco compensate for the text’s missteps and match every wacky and whimsical turn of the plot. Whether Miss Zuri is shape shifting into a nimble leopard or a hibernating bear, Cocco’s dynamic drawings make each fantastical transformation credible.
While the exact geographic location of Miss Zuri’s classroom is unknown, most of the characters, Miss Zuri inclusive, are clearly of African descent however Caucasian and Asian children are also represented. The decision to pair a Nigerian author with a European illustrator and to depict racially diverse characters lends the book an international appeal and speaks to the publishing company’s global scope. Ayikwa may be based in Awka, but they definitely intend for their books to travel far.
After thirty-two pages, the reader’s own journey with Miss Zuri comes to an end and class is dismissed, but not without lingering questions. Maths, social studies, or geography? One wonders what other subjects Miss Zuri and her magical shoes might yet bring alive.
***Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, etc.
