Thanks to the support from Uniting Care and local champion Rowena Turner who helped arrange the events, Meg Wheeler, local author, and Karen Fleischer, of Reading for Kids Gippsland, set out early on a Thursday morning to travel to Swifts Creek and Omeo primary schools to present workshops integrating Meg’s children’s picture books Speck’s Trek and Rumblette and Wizzle.
Speck’s Trek is an exciting adventure story of a little pebble. The storyline has been designed to help children notice and name emotions. Action packed with emotion, Speck’s challenges highlight the importance of family, community and connection. It is written in delightful iambic rhyme and has become a favourite many children want to read over again.
Speck’s Trek can also be used for emotional education. The story can help kids (aged four to 10) to recognise and better understand emotions, a key foundation of emotional intelligence.
Speck’s range of unique ‘feeling faces’ are included as a discussion activity for parents and teachers. The illustrations were inspired by the beautiful scenery at Mitta Mitta river. Meg hand drew the pictures with a felt tipped pen and coloured pencils then edited her original drawings in paint 3D.
Teachers’ notes have been developed for Speck’s Trek and Meg recently developed an interactive activity book, Speck’s Emotion Activity Book, for children to learn and further explore their own emotions. The students of both Swifts Creek and Omeo displayed a high level of emotional awareness and actively engaged in several activities.
Many schools in the region are familiar with Speck’s Trek, however Meg is sourcing valuable feedback for her upcoming tale Rumblette and Wizzle earlier in the process with just a few illustrations for this picture book completed so far.
During the school visits, Meg presented Swifts Creek and Omeo primary schools’ draft copies of Rumblette and Wizzle where she invited the students and teachers to have input into the two areas of the book she is currently redrafting.
The students loved being invited to be part of the book editing process. Some of the students had relayed how they aspired to be authors and/or illustrators and hearing feedback from them was uplifting for both Meg and Karen.
At each presentation, Karen shared the story of how she met Meg during COVID. Karen sighted a Facebook post by Meg announcing her book launch in three days’ time. Karen contacted Meg and volunteered to make a promotional video to promote the event. Meg said yes and Karen provided Meg an outline of the video.
Meg then sent Karen videos which she edited and some five hours later, the Reading for Kids Gippsland Facebook published the video of the book launch.
It was then shared 13 times by different sources during the next few days. Karen provided Meg with tips for her book launch which Meg greatly appreciated. Karen went on to volunteer to assist Meg before and after her successful book promotions.
Sometime later, Karen suggested to Meg that she pays Karen’s help forward by volunteering an author’s visit to a 2020 bushfire-affected school. Without question, Meg said yes and in the blink of an eye, an author’s visit was set in place for Clifton Creek Primary School.
Karen continued to volunteer to assist fledgling authors during her promotions of good Australian books, many of which overarched with the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) annual Book of the Year Shortlist.
Karen provided an overview of CBCA videos during the Omeo presentation acknowledging the support from Kate Freestone. Kate assisted several students to submit video or audio presentations in RFKG 2023 Tell Us Why Competition. The school pro-actively reads age-appropriate CBCA books.
Karen also mentioned the video feature of the picture book That Bird Has Arms by Kate and Jol Temple with Eagle Point Primary School students. The book overlapped with national event Dolly’s Dream. These key messages in the video by the students contribute to combating online bullying.
