Brown Bear & Oofie Present: The Lost Identity

Brown Bear & Oofie are best friends and have life-learning experiences together. In the Lost Identity, Brown Bear learns the importance of staying true to her own identity and not to change who she is in order to fit in with her friends. In "The Lost Identity", Brown Bear & Oofie have just been playing with their friend Herman. Herman is described to the reader as having a lot of freckles and Oofie admires his uniqueness. Brown Bear mistakenly thinks that looking more like Herman will make her cool like him. After a hilarious act of change, Brown Bear learns from Oofie that being like someone else does not make her cool and that being unique and an individual is what makes her special. Oofie is the voice of reason in this book and is sure to make your child giggle and have fun with the story while learning a valuable lesson. The drawings are purposely drawn in a child familiar style to help connect the message in the story to the young reader. The book contains feature words that are highlighted in the story and later, easily defined at the end, to provide the child a vocabulary to help them communicate confusing and difficult feelings and situations. This allows parents and teachers to talk with the young readers about their own experiences with feeling left out and use their new words to help express their own feelings. The Brown Bear and Oofie series is designed to draw in young readers with their approachable, colorful, expressive and loveable main characters. Each book presents a real, difficult situation that young children face daily, normalizes the situation, and provides the young reader and parents with a common vocabulary, highlighted and defined, to discuss these issues in a way that makes the child feel they are not alone in their difficult situations.

I was trying to communicate with my girls one day, and was left frustrated and unable to get my message across to them in a way that really helped them out with their problem. I sat down and started drawing simple drawings and then told a short story to go along with it. The girls were able to connect with me and I saw my "words of wisdom" sink in to their brains. The girls have their favorite stuffed animal from when they were babies and I was inspired to create characters and give them a voice. Voila! Eureka! Shazam! Brown Bear and Oofie characters were born!Brown Bear & Oofie are meant to look as if a child of a similar age of the reader, drew them. I believe the young readers can connect more this way. Social issues are hard. Especially for young kids. From my observations, before deciding on how to illustrate my books, I saw my own girls and other kids their age gravitate towards artwork that appeared to have been drawn by children. The simplicity of it all was not only appealing but just made sense. It immediately opened the door for more communication and random conversation with my girls. Random or not, it was a conversation and it worked. So after seeing this done repeatedly, I decided on my simplistic kid like drawings.I was simultaneously inspired by how kids can play for hours and hours with one background and reusable stickers, or paper dolls, or an app on their device that is basically a virtual paper doll set. That is why the background never changes in my books. I wanted to focus on the message and the details of the character's expressions and emotions.**Masami S.C. is a pseudonym created by Serena Masami Caspary