WILLIAMSTON, MI – How can parents explain the reason for continued virtual school, mask-wearing and all things related to the coronavirus pandemic?
A Jackson native thought a picture book could help – so she wrote one.
Pam Ostrander, now a teacher in Williamston, just east of Lansing, self-published “A Mask for Molly” in late 2020. Early in the pandemic, she saw the way children struggled with understanding the world around them. A story quickly filled her head and she went to work on her first book.
“A Mask for Molly” follows 5-year-old Eve as she wonders why she can no longer go to pre-school, visit the farmer’s market or see her favorite person, Grandma, when her parents suddenly begin working from home. Without much initial clarity from her family, she begins to assume what is “not safe” in the world at the time has to do with bad guys or big storms.
It’s something Ostrander, a teacher on a leave of absence from Discovery and Explorer Elementary Schools in Williamston, has seen before, even in her own family with children during the pandemic.
“If they don’t know what’s going on, they’ll draw their own conclusions,” she said. “They don’t know anything about COVID. It’s just dangerous, I can’t go anywhere. Then when someone tries to take them someplace, they get scared and they dig in like, ‘No, it’s not safe.’”
Ostrander has sold more than 150 copies of the book, many in the Williamston area, but some as far away as Arizona. She offers a bundle of locally made masks for children and dolls or stuffed animals, and said some customers like to buy it after they’ve read the book to their kids.
Ostrander teamed up with a former student to illustrate the book. Williamston resident Seth Pennington, 14, was in one of her third grade classes, and she sought him out because she knew of his artistic talents. He spent about four months illustrating the roughly 25-page book using Adobe Photoshop.
“I liked that I had to go into the mind of a wee-old child,” Pennington said. “Obviously kids don’t want normal looking humans, that’s kind of boring. So, I wanted to give them big old faces, big old expressions, big old color everywhere. I think that’s what appealed to them the most.”
The biggest challenge for him, he said, was the scope of the project. Pennington has illustrated for other family friends before, but never for something of this magnitude. It was worth the challenge, he said, to see his teacher’s reaction to each illustration.
“Each time I drew an illustration, she was so happy to see each come to life,” he said. “I’m glad that I was doing a good job and she saw what she wanted for it all.”
Ostrander hopes adults use the book to help explain to their children current world events in a fun and silly way. She said her 35-year career in education running daycares, classrooms, tutoring and more showed her how important it is to view things from a child’s perspective.
“When you’re in a classroom, it’s a lot easier to connect because I’ve always felt that if you capture their hearts, their minds will follow,” she said. “I just wanted to find a way to connect where I could maybe help their voices be heard because they look at things so much differently than us.”
The $11 book and accompanying $11 mask bundle are available online. Lansing-area residents can get contactless delivery for free and Jackson residents can have the book shipped to them for about $4.
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