'A' is for arboretum, but it's also for author.
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Canberra's Angela Ball is set to release ABC the ACT this week, a self-published book which uses the capital's landmarks to help teach children the alphabet.
For Ball, it was a labour of love which began at a time when her two eldest sons were starting to learn the alphabet and would enjoy spending their time outside as a family exploring Canberra.
"I guess for me it was almost being at one of these places [in the book] that the idea came about," she says.
"We'd go exploring and we would come across little places ... and I'm a photographer as well so I thought to myself 'I've got my camera with me, I've got my boys' and I guess over the years it just came together.
"I originally thought that it might just be more a photography book. And then I think, just when you're out and about you start to notice things in the landscape as well so I sort of came up with the idea of taking letters from the landscape and using the individual photos of the letters to build a bit of a story."
Six years on, and the mother-of-two is now a mother-of-three, and her youngest son is just at the age where he can now learn to read using his mum's book.
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While other children are learning their alphabet using apples, balls and cats, Ball's three-year-old son - and other Canberra children - will learn using the arboretum, Black Mountain and the Carillon.
"It's using language that isn't necessarily an early reader's language because you know a three-year-old would struggle saying the word arboretum but these are some of the words that kids in Canberra know," Ball says.
"It's just trying to sort of build the language of the place that we live and try to give it a bit more of a sophisticated look as well.
"It's not just for the early readers but older readers can hopefully find some joy I guess in reading in it and seeing places that they might have been before, or places that they want to go to."
But like all alphabet lists, some letters were harder than others. In Ball's case, it was the letter 'u'. In keeping with her Canberra theme, the author and photographer wanted to keep away from the traditional 'umbrella' and 'unicorn' - which she says she herself has read a thousand times in other alphabet books.
"I think the letter 'u' for me was tricky because in the book, 'u' is for uniform and the image is of an aerial shot down Anzac Parade so it's not your typical 'u' letter," she says.
"It's just coming up with a different perspective on things as well, so coming up with a different way of putting the alphabet together so people can read it in context as well, not just with different inanimate objects that happen to form letters in the alphabet."
ABC the ACT will officially be launched on Wednesday, during Book Week.
The event at the Civic Library will begin at 10.30am with a book reading from Teo Gebert from ABC's Play School, before an official launch by Chief Minister Andrew Bar at 12.30pm.
- For more information about ABC the ACT or the event go to abctheact.com.au