Townsville children’s author publishes book about the February floods to teach kindness

A children’s book written about the February floods hopes to teach kids that small acts of kindness can go a long way in society.

A CHILDREN’S book written about the Townsville February floods hopes to teach kids that small acts of kindness can go a long way in society.

Children’s book author Chelsea Smith said Flood of Kindness explored the act of giving and would be available to buy in January at the Museum of Tropical Queensland.

“This book is about the Townsville floods and it starts out covering what happened and then it goes in to showing how the community supported each other,” she said.

“Just the small things about giving a meal to someone or larger things like collecting donations or helping people clean up their houses.”

Chelsea Smith has written a book to help kids through trauma and emotions as a result of the 2019 February floods. PICTURE: MATT TAYLOR.

The book is Ms Smith’s fifth children’s publication and said the idea for Flood of Kindness originated on social media.

“There was a Facebook page that someone started that was flood related and people kept posting these, “I have these shoes if anyone needs them or I have a bed if anyone needs to stay,” she said.

“I write a website for character education and morals for kids and I thought, wow this is a really good example of showing kids of how people can support the community.”

Ms Smith said the self-published book included more than 50 photos donated by 30 individuals and 12 organisations.

“It has been a really supportive response when I asked for photos, within 30 minutes there was a couple of hundred and overall I had 700 photos submitted for consideration,” she said.

“It is like a scrapbook and I designed it like a photo album so that it could be anyone’s photo album of the flood.”

The Kirwan resident said she had two aims for publishing the children’s book.

“I want to help kids process what happened (during the floods), like a record what was going on in the community,” she said.

“Second, to really help them think about when emergencies happen in the community how they can help.”

Originally published as Townsville children’s author publishes book about the February floods to teach kindness