The children’s author Petr Brezina is developing a new series of fairy tales and multimedia materials to help educate young children on life skills, like basic financial literacy, family values and social skills.
The series, Fairytales for Better Beginnings aims to equip children from underprivileged and low-income backgrounds. Brezina is working with teachers, experts and children themselves to develop them.
He discovered there was a need for such materials when he visited schools around the Czech Republic.
“Suddenly I was in so-called socially excluded locations where it’s completely normal that a 13-year-old girl is raped, she tells her teachers, they call the parents, and her dad looks at her and says – See, you’ve got it over with, we’re going home,” said Brezina.
More than 100,000 people live in so-called socially excluded areas in the Czech Republic, according to the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Science. These locations are primarily associated with high unemployment, crime, and a pattern of generations of the same families surviving on social benefits.
Brezina met a teacher working in one of these areas and found out her students read his previous books. This inspired him to write a collection of fairy tale stories for them.
“The book will have seven stories – that’s why I called it Fairytales For Happy Beginnings,” said Brezina. Teachers will create worksheets, songs, puzzles and other supplementary materials to go along with them, and involve pupils in the process, he added.
“The point is not to tell them, ‘You’re stupid so you won’t achieve anything’, but to explain that even those who have not had the best luck in their lives can be happy when they become a baker, for example, and be happy when people love their pastries.”
Last year, Brezina won praise when he successfully launched Fairy Tales For Children from Ukraine, a bilingual storybook which helped thousands of Ukrainian children learn the Czech language.
His new project should start next year as soon as he collects the necessary funding.
