My School Visit

Yesterday I went back to school…Not for me this time.  I was there on behalf of my client, Calvin Mitchell, who has this wonderful fitness book called “Our Backyard, – Wild New Zealand.”  I’ll tell you a bit more about the story later.

I had made arrangements to visit a local Intermediate School (year 8 & 9) to visit a Maori Immersion Class.  This is a class where they speak and lean Maori most of the day to do their schoolwork.

The teacher is lovely and welcoming, the children a bit noisy though well behaved.  A great sign of a great school.  Once the children has settled, with help from the teacher I put up a slideshow on the projector (nope never done this before, it was easy and fun).  The slideshow was in Maori.  In the end, I gave out the different pages of the book as handouts and put up the English version so they could translate and see if it matched the work done by my wonderful Translator ‘Tira.’  What the teacher and I noticed -when I think back – was that some of the English words were a bit big and confusing.  This led to the idea of the children going through the manuscript during their reading time – as a learning concept – to change a few words in English and Maori to make it readable for more children and adults.  I mentioned to the teacher, as a publisher and author I had a few more books which needed to be translated -Tira is going back to college so proud of her!! – Meaning there could be a great opportunity for the children to learn about translation and a bit about publishing.

The feedback was amazing, they loved the illustrations and made the connection with the animals and the fitness exercises.  One young lad wanted to know when the book would be released, another asked about the DVD I mentioned, which may be produced with the book.

Thank you to the school, class and especially the teacher for assisting me with this book.

The story follows two young siblings, Anya and Austin as they travel through New Zealand, finding different animals and birds and noticing how they move.  These movements turn into fun exercises for them.  

Calvin Mitchell is a local author who wants to help children improve their fitness in a fun and unique way.  Showing the adventures of the children’s journey and then going through the exercises they discover with the animal movements with eye catching art by Jam Ducre ( a local artist) makes a wonderful book.  Calvin owns ‘Instinctive Fitness,’  If you wish to know more, please contact us for details.