What do children want to be?

The first thing I needed to do was to try and think of a list of things children want to be. Using a mix of internet research on forums, and asking people I know what they wanted to be when they were young, and/or what their children have said they want to be, I wrote down all the ideas I thought would be effective.

Although there were a lot of job aspirations - such as becoming an astronaut, a ballerina, a firefighter, a superhero... - there were also a large amount of impossible things such as animals and objects. 
I thought that the stranger and impossible things were far more interesting than the realistic ones, and I thought that the career choice ideas were more of an adult view on how children think than thinking at children's level, so I decided to use the stranger ideas.

I used the start of a sentence: "When I grow up, I want to be..." to come up with some sketches and ideas of how to portray children becoming the things they want to be.

I decided to focus on a few of the stronger ideas:

• a cat
• a flower
• a tree/a leaf
• a butterfly
• a balloon
• a giant
• a star
• the moon
• a mouse

My next job was trying to write a narrative around these ideas. My initial sketches had all been of different children with a before and an after image, but I couldn't think of a way of using lots of children and still having a strong narrative and keeping the book consistent.

I decided to focus on one child imagining all the things she wants to be in an average day. This way I could have a clear beginning and an end to my story - her waking up at the start, and going back to bed at the end - and make a story around the things she would do during the day.