I just wrote an adorable little-kids story., enjoy to your inner child's content. Options

[Rebecca]

The girl and her dog

Once upon a time, there was a dog who had gotten lost from his family. He got very hungry, but living on the streets had made him look scary, so people were afraid to become friends with him, and wouldn't feed him. One day, the dog was stumbling around, on the verge of starvation, when he met a little girl named Mary. Mary helped the dog get better. She cared for him and fed him until he looked and acted like his old self before he'd gotten lost. He asked her, "Aren't you scared of me like everyone else?" Mary said, "No. I'm blind, and can't see what you look like. But I can tell, just by your voice and what you do that you're a nice dog who just needs a friend." The dog became very attatched to Mary, and wanted to help her like she had helped him. Mary's parents couldn't afford to buy a professionally trained seeing-eye dog, so the dog decided that he would lead Mary wherever she went. Since Mary had just about saved the dog's life, she decided to name him Chance, and they went everywhere together. One day, Mary's parents found a missing dog poster for Chance, and knew that his original owners missed him very much, and decided that the best thing to do was to return him. They brought Mary and Chance to the family, and told them how much the two had become friends and helped each other, and how much the two had changed each other's lives. The family decided to let Mary keep her new friend, and the two grew up together happily ever after.


I totally got this idea after watching Dogs101 all day.........

[Mizukithepanda]

It is for adults, because we have to remember that children don't have fully-formed concepts of the things adults do. That's actually what I was going to go into next.

In order for an especially young child (again, we're talking a child under the age of five) to identify "the dog" and "the girl", they need to be presented to them in easy to understand sequences. The child may not have been presented with the idea of a dog yet and so to them, the word essentially means nothing. You have to describe it to them and give them a visual aid to help commit the idea to memory. Same thing with the girl. You have to present the idea of the girl both in literary and visual format so as to reinforce that idea and have the child identify "the girl" as what you're presenting to them.

To use my previous example, a child's understanding might go something like this:

This cat was the ugliest cat anyone had ever seen.

Cat = Ugliest Cat
Ugliest Cat = ???

It had a squashed in, mashed up face,

Face = squashed in, mashed up
Squashed in, mashed up = Illustration

with eyes so thin you woulda sworn it had no eyes

Eyes = thin
Thin = almost no eyes

(if it wasn't for that green glow coming from between the lids.)

This bit is complicated, because a young child would have difficulty connecting it with the previous idea. They'd understand the concept of "green glow" as well as the "between the lids" part due to the illustration, but unless if it's reworded to connect more directly with the "thin eyes" bit, they might have trouble realizing that that's what it's describing. (Again, we're talking very young children.)

Its nose was black like a dog's and wetter than a dog's too,

This requires prior knowledge of what a dog's nose is like. Provided the child has that knowledge they'd identify it as such:
Nose = black
Nose = wet
How Wet = wetter than a dog's
If they knew how wet a dog's nose was, then they'd know how wet this cat's nose was, but if they didn't, all they'd know was that the nose was wet.

with shriveled up folds leading down in a zigzag line.

Folds = shriveled
Where = down
How = zigzag line
shriveled, down, and zigzag line = Illustration


And finally, after being presented all of that, the child should have formed an idea of what the "Ugliest Cat" is, provided they retained the ideas they just learned.

This is why you can't just have dogs randomly talking in books for young children. You haven't presented them with the idea of the dog talking, so it'll make no sense to the child and might prevent them from being able to identify the dog as the dog. It's for this same reason that you need to choose a simple name for the dog and make sure it has it from the start. If you present the dog to the child as "The Dog", then they will come to identify it as "The Dog". Suddenly calling it "Chance" breaks that identification and forces the child to reevaluate the idea they had already been presented.

I know it sounds complicated, and I probably made it sound much worse than it actually is with the way I described it, but when writing for children, you really have to keep their simplicity in mind and utilize it to plant your ideas in their heads. You can't just expect them to know things. They're too young for that.