Picture books · Ages 4 to 8 · English and Spanish
Two stories in one book.
Read it forward and it's Bob's story. Turn it over, read the same words back, and it's Otto's.
Bob's way · front to back
Six lines, in Bob's order. He wants to go higher.
Print a whole story, free.
One sheet of paper. One cut. Two minutes, and a child has a real little book they can read both ways. No email needed — the files are right here.
-
The Swing
Bob wants to go higher. Otto is holding on. Read it back and it is Otto's afternoon, not Bob's.
-
We Forgot It Again new
They forgot the ball. Again. Read it back and you find out why they keep forgetting — and it happens all over.
English PDF Español soon
Free to print and copy for home, classroom and library use.
How to fold it — one cut, no glue
- Print on one side, landscape, at 100% — or "fit to page", it folds the same.
- Fold the sheet in half the long way, then unfold it.
- Fold it in half the short way, then fold each end back to the middle, like a fan of four.
- Cut along the dashed line — only across the two middle panels.
- Open it, fold along the long fold, and push both ends in toward the middle. The cut opens into a little book. Bob's cover is on the front; Otto's is on the back.
Or read one here, right now.
The Swing, page by page. Pick a cover to start.
Bob's way · read the left page first
1 of 3
That was Bob's story.
Now turn it over.
Same pages, same words. Read them the other way and they belong to Otto.
Same six lines. Two stories.
Every Bob & Otto book works like this.
Forward, Bob wanted to go higher. Backward, Otto was there the whole way down. Neither of them was wrong — they just had different halves of the same afternoon.
Tip: use the arrow keys, or swipe.
Five books. Ten stories.
Each one is a small, ordinary misunderstanding between two best friends. Tap a cover to turn it over.
Swipe to see all five →
Kindle is live now in English and Spanish, $2.99 each. Paperback ($7.99) lands as soon as distribution switches on.
Most books tell a child to see the other side. These show it.
Forward, you are inside Bob's head: what he heard, what he decided, why he walked off. Turn the book over and you are inside Otto's — the same words, a different story. Nobody was wrong. Nobody asked.
That is the one habit the books practice: before you decide what someone meant, ask how they heard it.
- About a hundred words each way. Short enough for bedtime. Twice.
- The last page is the first page. Every book opens and closes on the same line.
- Find the sparrow. It sits on every one of Otto's pages and never on Bob's, so a child always knows whose side they're on.
- One question at the end. What did the other boy mean?
For teachers and counselors
One cut. Two minutes. A ten-minute lesson on hearing the other side.
Print the mini book for a whole class from one sheet each. Read it forward together, turn it over, read it back — then ask the question the books are built around: what did the other boy mean?
- Free to copy for classroom and library use
- English and Spanish, for dual-language rooms
- Perspective-taking without ever using the word
Thank you.
You're on the list.
I'll write when the paperback is out, and when the next mini book is ready. In the meantime, both of the ones that exist are free to print:
Meet them
Tap anyone to hear them in their own words.
Why I made these
I'm Jesper K. Lassen — Danish, a mentalist with more than a thousand performances behind me, and the founder of VEN Method. My whole working life has been about what one person notices and another one misses.
Children carry home bad feelings they never needed, because they heard half of something and decided the rest. I wanted a book that doesn't tell them to see the other side — it hands it to them, and they turn it over themselves.
For classrooms: VEN Method builds the same connection at school — a whole group around one shared thing. venmethod.com ↗