HER RIPPIN NEW BOOKS Sally Rippin is one of Australia’s best-selling and most-beloved children’s authors. She has written over 50 books for children and young adults, and her mantel holds numerous awards for her writing. Best known for her Billie B Brown, Hey Jack! and Polly & Buster series, Sally loves to write stories with heart and create haracters that resonate with children, parents and teachers alike. We chat about her latest book series, School of Monsters. If you haven’t got some Sally Rippin books in the bookshelf somewhere for your school age kids, I’m just not sure you’re doing this parenting thing right! Sally’s junior fiction has been delighting young readers for years and it’s not to be missed! Sally has often been asked by parents, educators and book shops to create a series for emerging readers which would provide a bridge between educational readers and early chapter books. After writing her Billie B series Sally knew she wanted to create something for a younger demographic, who were just beginning their reading journey, but she really didn’t know how she could do it as it would involve using such a simplified vocabulary she wasn’t used to. Sally let this idea brew for quite a long time in her head before she actually started writing. The inspiration to finally make it happen came about through her research for an adult book she’s currently developing. This book is designed to help parents who have children that struggle to read, particularly neurodiverse kids like her son who is dyslexic and ADHD. Reading has always been a struggle for him, and he doesn’t enjoy it, so this has always been Sally’s primary reading audience, engaging kids who say they hate reading or genuinely struggle to learn to read. Sally’s new kids’ series, School of Monsters, has cleverly designed pages that have one feature word at the end of each sentence. Children can start by reading only the last word on every line and work their way up to reading the whole story. This idea originally came from a speech pathologist, who Sally was on an educational 6
panel with about 5 or 6 years ago, who had mentioned that the way she engages some of her older students, who may be dyslexic, was to work with complex material of something they were really into, like Star Wars for example. She would take a Star Wars book and highlight single words that they could sound out for themselves and then grow from there. This planted the idea for a series that Sally could work on for younger children learning to read, where they too could start with just a word and then move into sentences around that word. She took this one step further by making the key words rhyme, building confidence with these young readers with that additional help too. The words are repeated at the back of the book out of context too so they can practice reading them on their own as well.
“Nothing can take the place of a teacher’s role in those important first years of a child’s reading journey, but my hope is that everything I write will be engaging and accessible enough to entice even the most struggling of readers to want to learn.” With such an exciting and accomplished writing career, I was keen to find out from Sally where all this began. It turns out she started as an illustrator, not a writer! The very first book she wrote and illustrated was in 1996. She’d just returned from studying painting in China and as she was quite good at Chinese picked up some work tutoring Chinese/Australian students. One particular
