Mr Mellow likes yellow….but what about red, orange, green and blue, and all the other colours too?

Can his quirky animal crew persuade bright, bimodal* Mr Mellow that there’s more to like than just yellow?

*Mr Mellow is deaf; to help him to hear, he wears a hearing aid on one ear and a cochlear implant on the other!

Mr Mellow really is a cool dude - dressed all in yellow and ready for a raucous adventure with his colourful animal crew. With each page turn, the story builds, each time adding a new colour, a new creature, a new twist to the tale… and culminating in a celebratory feast of colour!

This is an inclusive children’s book starring a character who happens to be deaf, but is not specifically about hearing loss. Mr Mellow Likes Yellow is an exuberant tale about a funny and flamboyant fellow (who has a white kite that he flies at night, while balancing on his bed that is rich ruby-red) and his fantastical animal friends. The book will get kids laughing while reciting along with the rhyming verse, as it builds from page to page.

The book allows children who use assistive hearing technology to see themselves represented (through the totally fabulous Mr Mellow) and shows everyone, whether they have hearing loss or not, that wearing hearing aids and/or cochlear implants is really very cool indeed!

For those parents and therapists who wish to use it as a speech and language development resource, the book integrates listening and spoken language (LSL) strategies, which the author employed when teaching her own daughter (who is profoundly deaf and aided by cochlear implants) to listen and speak. These strategies include:

Audition before vision: New characters and new colours are described in words on the page before we actually see them, allowing the child’s brain to process the auditory information prior to the visual information.

Talking ahead - what comes next? As the book introduces new colours and new characters one by one, the reader and the child can have great fun guessing and discussing which colour and which character might be revealed next.

Practicing auditory closure: Structured as a poem which repeats and builds as the pages turn, the book offers multiple opportunities to practice auditory closure (when the reader pauses and allows the child to fill in the next word or phrase).

Strengthening auditory memory: Children will naturally want to join in with reciting the poem as it repeats and builds throughout the book. The reader can pause periodically to allow the child to recite as much as they can from memory.

Expansion of vocabulary: This book is a celebration of colour… but it doesn’t just utilise the most common names for the most common colours. It encourages children to expand their descriptive vocabulary to include different names for different colours, as well as describing the properties of different colours and what they represent.

Developing emotional intelligence and theory of mind: A central concept woven into the book is the exploration of preferences: different people (or animals in this case!) like different things - in the book, this is expressed through different characters liking different colours for different reasons. This can open up wonderful discussions with children about their own preferences, why they have these preferences and why different people might not always feel the same way they do - and why that’s okay!

Written by Tanya Saunders (creator of Ling Ling Bird) and illustrated by the irrepressibly colourful artist, Lorena Villegas-Ci