Words are powerful tools.
They can start or end conflicts. They can inspire passion and powerful deeds or quash the strongest of spirits. They can be the impetus of great good or lever of great harm. At Wundermill, we are mindful of this with every book we publish for young readers and our mission is focused on empowerment — showing young people that what they do matters, that what they care about is worthy of their attention and dedication, and that even now, as children, they can make a real difference.
This approach comes to life with many of our books that focus on nature (animals and ecosystems) with amazing stories and real science baked into them. Our goal is to inspire new generations to engage in lifelong learning and discovery about the natural world, earth and other sciences. To get kids excited, we disseminate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) content through storytelling. But curating books that capture and holds the attention of young minds (and their parents and educators), takes so much more.
In addition to create emotional connections between kids and nature through our books subjects and characters (that good children’s books seek to do), we do three things for many of our books that are unique to Wundermill:
- We include backmatter with content that takes children beyond the story and deeper into the subject matter
- We use QR codes in all our new books to create augmented reality content with additional static and streaming content that brings many of the pages to life
- We work with educators to design and provide free downloadable Lesson Guides for schools and community educators (and stream books into classrooms via Epic Reads!)
Why? Because we believe that it does “take a village to raise a child” — in this case, not only getting kids themselves engaged and inspired, but also their parents, teachers, and community educators to participate and support their interests. So whether a book about a bald eagle that was given the first 3D printed prosthetic beak to survive or a children’s alphabet book with real astronauts from the International Space Station (that went to the ISS and was read by an astronaut and streamed to classrooms around the world), in addition to words, FUN MATTERS.
We’re small but mighty! Since we published our first children’s titles in 2016, we’ve earned more than 15 children’s literary awards and appointments, including Best Science Picture Book, Best Children’s STEM Book, and others.
