Many of you will be like me. You will have strong recollections of reading NZ stories in a NZ school.  Depending on your age, the gender, ethnic background and nature of the story itself hopefully got more diverse as we moved towards 2024. Our students need to hear a diverse range of books from a diverse range of authors. 

That means this space will offer books for road testing from a wide range of authors. It will encourage you to participate in your local readers and writers festival (not just as a teacher but as an audience member), we'll connect you with ways to have the Writers in Schools authors visit your classroom. We want the names of NZ authors old and new to be rolling off your tongue and the tongues of your students.  

We want to take books and road test them. We want to do this with a bunch of clever ideas and enthusiastic teachers (our road testers).  We want to work collaboratively with each other and share ideas about how we could teach things well. Our Teacher Champions will contribute methods that we use when we are inventing a School Kit. Our road testers will share their progress in this space as the journey unfolds. Be generous to them and please appreciate that it isn't easy to be sharing your successes and failures with your teaching colleagues. 

There is no shame in sharing ideas for how to do something well especially when it works. It is what School Kit is built on. So that is what we will be doing here. At the end of each road test, we'll bundle up all the tips and tricks our road testers have used with their book and we'll re-package them for you as a unit of work you can download from here for free. 

We want you to be able to teach books by NZ authors brilliantly. We want to focus on the skills of how to unpack a book with our students in new ways we haven’t thought about before. We want to share how we do this with others in the Squad.

Reading can't just be about NZ authors, there is too much good writing in the world for that. Don't freak out but we're also going to try recommending a few of the classics that maybe you should consider tucking under your belt (not just because you are a teacher but because you are a human being). There are some VERY good TedEd videos on a bunch of books that changed the world. We're going to share those along with a link to where you can find the book for sale online. 

We want to make this space a place where you can return for recommendations of podcasts, bookish instagram accounts, reviews of good books, independent book shops, reminders of when your local writers festival is on, who to see and where to get tickets.  

It’s important that you read for pleasure too (it can't all be about your students). Penguin has all the inside scoop on the best holiday reads. Keep an eye out for reading recommendations of books that are just for you, we’ll also have some free copies for active Squad Members to help your holiday reading addiction.

At the end of the day there is also a hard truth here. We're the people in charge of helping our students hear those stories for the first time, we're in charge of tapping them on the shoulder and saying 'you should read this', we're in charge of creating their first reading memories. We're in charge of whether they become readers or not. 

And forty years from now ?

We want our students to be able to say to their colleague, to give to their own child, to share with the audience at the conference where they are delivering the keynote address, to recall in their autobiography of a life well lived, to give as an answer in the documentary of their celebrity life, to offer as a rock solid recommendation to their 3 million Tiktok followers, to read to their grandchild as they go to bed or perhaps to share with their own class of students 

"this is the book I remember my teacher, [ insert your name here ] giving me and it changed the way I thought about the world forever]"

And so that reading thing. That's on us. And we really need to own that.