Original Roots of Sophia's Red Hat

I can tell you how the Sophia Series originated. It started when my daughter lost her favorite knit hat. She decided to knit herself a new one and then began knitting hats for her family. I liked the fact that she kindly shared her newly acquired skill with others. And I saw how she turned a disappointing situation into something positive that went on to inspire others. What a great base for a story line!

So I developed the character of Sophia who becomes an inspiration to her town showing the qualities of kindness, joy, enthusiasm, and helpfulness. I created an underlying thread in the first story, Sophia’s Red Hat, showing the exponential growth of people doing kind deeds. The kindness spreads from one person to the next, until the whole town becomes immersed in doing kind deeds.

Being a math enthusiast, I used the idea of spreading kindness as the base for the math problem embedded in the story, which can be adapted to a simplified or an advanced version. Young children will have fun finding the white cat in every illustration or counting the red hats from one page to the next. Older children can be challenged with figuring out the actual number of hats that were knit for everyone in the town.

This series is also about friendship. At the end of the second book, Sophia’s Yellow Scarf, Sophia makes a new friend and the two of them are ready to start on a new journey. However, the new friendship did not come that easy. I few things had to be worked out first; one of them being the question of who really was the true owner of the scarf? Eventually, this gets sorted out when Sophia answers another math question, and the newly introduced character in book two becomes a sure and steadfast friend of Sophia with their adventures carrying on in the third book.