The Thingity-Jig

by Kathleen Doherty
illustrated by Kristyna Litten

The Thingity-Jig is my new favorite book! It is a joyful, readful, inventive thing that bounces and sways and turns reading to play. Perfectly-paced with tasty prose and warmed with wonderful, whimsical scenes.

An absolute delight to read and a marvelous feast for the eyes—get ready for The Thingity-Jig to enter heavy rotation for reading time.

From the publisher (Peachtree Publishing):

This jovial frolic through the city and woods celebrates ingenuity and teems with whimsical wordplay—a delightful read for any STEAM storytime.

Under the light of a silvery moon, Bear wanders into people town and discovers a springy thing, a bouncy thing—a sit-on-it, jump-on-it thing! This Thingity-Jig is too heavy to carry home by himself, so Bear runs back to the woods and asks for help. Too bad for Bear, his friends are sleepy and shoo him away. So Bear invents a Rolly-Rumpity to wheel the Thingity-Jig home, but then it all gets stuck in the mud! How will Bear tackle this bump in the road? With a Lifty-Uppity, of course!

Reading specialist and former educator Kathy Doherty perfectly blends inventive upcycling and STEAM elements with a delightful story in this wonderfully charismatic picture book. Illustrator Kristyna Litten brings the world to life with incredible settings and empathetic characters.

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If you’re interesting in learning how to write and draw your own comics, check out my book Let’s Make Comics! An Activity Book to Create, Write, and Draw Your Own Cartoons.

A light-hearted interactive guide to comics and cartoon-making that uses an activity book format and creatively stimulating prompts to teach the fundamentals of cartooning in a fun and easy-to-follow fashion.

From a working cartoonist and comic book making instructor, this all-ages activity book uses humorous and informative one-page comics and exercise prompts to guide young readers (and readers who are young at heart) through easy-to-master lessons on the skills needed to make comics. The activities cover a range of essential comics-making tasks from creating expressions for characters to filling in blank panels to creating original characters and placing them in adventures of their own. Each exercise can stand on its own or work together with others in the book to stimulate creativity via the comics medium. In the end, readers who complete the activities inside the book itself will have created several comics of their own, and will have generated many ideas for more sequential art creations.

If you’d like to read my next graphic novel for FREE and before it’s published, sign up for my First Readers Club here.