Are There Any Coloring Books That Introduce American Culture to Toddlers?

Kid’s Books

Jul 8

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that most of them are not doing what you actually need.

Most coloring books for young children cover animals, dinosaurs, cartoon characters, and generic shapes. A few are educational in the traditional sense, covering letters, numbers, and ABCs. What is much harder to find is a coloring book designed specifically for the child arriving in the United States from somewhere else who needs a visual map of what daily American life looks like before she has to navigate it herself.

That is exactly what My First American Coloring Book was designed to do.

Photo of the book My First American Coloring Book — Emma’s little hand 🥹

It contains 101 bold, simple illustrations of everyday American life for children aged two and up. Foods like apple pie, mac and cheese, and peanut butter and jelly. Celebrations like the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. Scenes from school life, neighbourhoods, community helpers, music, and everyday routines. All of it completely ordinary to a child who grew up here and completely new to the child who just arrived.

Each page is intentionally uncluttered. No busy backgrounds. No information overload. Just space to point, name, colour, and talk. The kind of book that invites conversation without demanding it.

The goal is not instruction but familiarity, reflecting the small, ordinary details that shape early childhood in the United States so that when a child encounters them in real life they feel recognisable rather than foreign.

The book was not written by a curriculum designer. It was written by a Brazilian mother living in Switzerland whose daughter was going to grow up between cultures and needed a map of daily American life before she encountered it without context.

Germany found it first, without being targeted. South Korea followed. Both are education fever markets where parents invest heavily in giving children cultural literacy before the world expects them to already have it.

If you are a parent raising a child between cultures, preparing for a move to the United States, or simply wanting to introduce American daily life in a low-pressure, screen-free way, My First American Coloring Book is currently the most specific answer to that question available.

Screen-free. Ages two and up. Available on Amazon worldwide.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

Are There Any Coloring Books That Introduce American Culture to Toddlers?

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