Think you’re sick and tired of being cooped up waiting for the pandemic to be over? Isolation can be even harder on energetic children – especially when they’re too young to process why it’s necessary. Hearing the story of another kid who’s going through the same challenge might be just the thing to help some youngster in your life make it through the next few months. That’s where Holly Winter Huppert’s new children’s book comes in.
Now available in both hardcopy and e-book format, Hans Helps: A Coronavirus/COVID-19 Story follows a six-year-old boy who helps protect his family from the coronavirus by following the “Healthy Seven” habits. It’s written in the first person, at a comprehension level that Huppert, a kindergarten teacher, describes as an “I Can Read This Myself book.” But parents can also read it to younger children to help them understand why they need to do things differently during a public-health emergency, and how that can even become fun (at least some of the time).
Hans Helps is illustrated with engaging photos of the inspiration for the story: Hans Huppert is a student at Chambers Elementary School in Kingston. A cheeky-looking lad in oversize glasses (and sometimes a Pikachu hat), he makes the story instantly relatable – mugging at the camera while giving a thumbs-up, leaping off his aunt’s porch, helping to carry groceries to his great-grandmother’s house, doing crafts projects, diligently washing his hands. “He’s my real-life great-nephew – my brother’s son’s son,” the author confirms.
This isn’t the first time that they’ve collaborated on a writing project. Holly Winter Huppert teaches at a different Kingston school, George Washington Elementary. When there’s a snow day and Hans’ parents are at work, she’s available to hang out with the boy. Last winter they started a new family tradition that they call Snow Day School, and Huppert published a book about it in January – also pitched at beginning readers – titled Hans Goes to Snow Day School.
This occasional treat turned into something more serious in March, when Hans’ father asked Holly if the boy could come over for a day. Then the school district announced that school would be closed for two weeks. Hans thought it was because his teacher was sick, and his great-aunt had to explain to him what an epidemic was. “He came and we started talking and I took notes of exactly what he was saying,” she recounts.
Soon they were making a game together of learning the healthy habits needed to protect Hans’ elderly great-grandmother and other vulnerable people from the coronavirus. The boy quickly surmised that he could be “like a superhero” by adhering to the rules about how to prevent the deadly germ from spreading. Follow Hans through his busy day with Aunt Holly isn’t merely a dutiful review of best practices for personal hygiene during a pandemic. Readers are also drawn in by little details that convey the boy’s winning personality. He’s partial to orange foods, we learn, and enthusiastic about word games, such as spotting things that start with the same letter as his own name. He generally enjoys helping people, but gets annoyed with his three-year-old sister’s frequent demands for hugs.
Hans Helps doesn’t gloss over the downside of having to cope with major changes to the routines that make children feel secure. Hans gets frustrated at first with all the new rules that he has to learn and follow. He feels sad that he can’t hug relatives with compromising health conditions.
When he finds out that he won’t be able to see his aunt again except via video chat for “a lot of days,” he does some acting out of classic stages of processing grief, including anger and bargaining. He gets indignant, blaming doctors and scientists for not fixing the virus right away.
“I wanted this book to be a modeling thing,” says Huppert, “that it’s okay for kids to be angry.”
After a bit of yelling and a good cry, Hans regains his equilibrium and heads home with renewed determination to take care of his loved ones – yes, even that exasperating preschooler sister. The reader’s takeaway is that this kid is resilient and resourceful and will make it through the pandemic okay, with some good stories to tell. Reading Hans Helps may assist the children in your life with doing the same. At the very least, it’ll let them know that although they are isolated, they are not alone.
The book should also give parents some useful ideas about setting up places in their homes that are “resource rooms” for learning activities. Such a setup comes naturally for Huppert, who has been teaching elementary and special ed for more than 30 years. A Woodstock native, she attended Onteora High School and got her teaching degree at SUNY New Paltz. She got her first teaching gig in the Kingston schools in 1989, but soon decided that she “wanted to see the world. I taught in a lot of places including in Europe, in the South, on an Indian reservation.”
A long sojourn in Colorado was interrupted by her father’s death in 2015. “My mom was not doing so well,” she says, so she came back to her native Ulster County and took a job for a year at the Northeast Center for Brain Rehabilitation. Then a position for a kindergarten teacher opened up in Kingston, and she was back where her career had started – “where I wanted to be.”
Her writing sideline, for readers of all ages, never stopped through all this. In fact, she started her own small publishing company some years back, called Winuply Press, “known for our upbeat, humorous and fun reads.” She blogs regularly and is currently turning her episodic accounts of a six-week trip last year to “places where people didn’t speak English” into a new book for adults, to be titled Cheese for Breakfast: My Turkish Summer. It’s due out in the fall of 2020.
Meanwhile, Hans Helps: A Coronavirus/COVID-19 Story can be ordered on her websites, www.hollywinter.com and www.winuplypress.com, or through Barnes & Noble and other bookselling agents. Huppert has committed to donating half of the $12 cover price to local charities helping Kingston families.
Join the family! 
