The Choptank Tolomato Legacy Project is a non-profit located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and St. Augustine, Florida.
Founded in 2021, The Choptank Tolomato Legacy Project (CTLP) facilitates hands-on pubic mural and childhood literacy projects focusing on regional history. Along with sprawling, local mural projects, they also intend on producing a variety of coloring and reading materials. The coloring books are designed to spark interest in the cultural legacy of the region through visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile learning experiences.
CTLP products are meant for all readers. Author Jimmy has decades of experience working with students of all ages and of all reading levels. Before spearheading the non-profit project, Jimmy spent over 20 years working closely with students with diagnosed learning disabilities, to students those with varying levels of developmental disabilities.
CTLP’s first product is a 60+ page coloring book called A is for Arster. These perfect bound 8.5x11 booklets contain spreads for each letter of the alphabet. On the left page of the spread is an illustration of the highlighted word, and on the right is a text description. There is also a 6 page index in the back which offers more information on each ABC’s highlighted.
Most of the coloring pages are matched with the Japanese poetry forms of either the haiku or the tanka. The haiku is the more familiar of the two styles of expression. A haiku is defined as an unrhymed verse form possessing three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively. A tanka consists of an unrhymed verse form usually containing five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively. The haiku style was originally created as the preface of a longer poem, and the tanka style was originally meant to be a short love letter. Over the years the forms have changed a bit as they have grown in popularity world wide.