Her rippin new books We meet Sally Rippin

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 and Buster series, Sally loves to write stories with heart, as well as characters 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, but what about the kids who haven’t learnt to read yet? Sally has long been asked by parents, educators and booksellers to create a series for emerging readers that creates 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. This idea was brewing for quite a long time in her head before she started writing and a lot of it came about through the research she was doing for an adult book she’s currently writing, designed to help parents who have children that struggle to read, particularly helping parents with neurodiverse kids like her son who is dyslexic and ADHD. Reading has always been a struggle for her son, and he doesn’t enjoy it, so this has always been her primary audience, engaging kids who say they hate reading or genuinely struggle to learn to read. The new 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 panel with about 5 or 6 years ago. The speech pathologist mentioned that the way she engages some of her older students, who may be dyslexic, was to take quite 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 girl was always complaining how her parents made

her speak Chinese at home, so Sally made her a handmade book to show her that actually her story wasn’t so bad and having a second language and culture was really interesting. She showed the book to a librarian friend who suggested she try and get it published as there would be so many kids who could relate to that story. And so she did, but this was years before she had any idea about how to write for children and it won an illustrators award which meant Sally was approached to illustrate other books which then led to great contacts in publishing houses and the beginning of her writing career. When asked what Sally’s favourite book is she sweetly says Polly and Buster. “Everything that matters to me I crammed into that book. I grew up in South East Asia, so I was always an expat kid, but very aware of my privilege. My mum always had local friends which was unusual for expats and they always talked to us about how we had a privileged life. So from a very young child the sense of where you are born and the skin you are born into can dictate the type of life you leave always seemed very unfair to me. Why should I get a better ride than everyone else? We try to teach children not to judge people by colour, race etc, but then you turn on the TV and that’s what you see is happening. So I wanted to create an analogy that can show how these things can happen, that if you don’t call each other out, how easy is can be to slip into the mindsets of the other. So rather than making my characters two humans that were different from each other, be it different cultural beliefs, different coloured skin... I created a family of witches and a family of monsters. Polly and Buster live next door to each other but one is a witch one is a monster, and they live in a town where they shouldn’t be friends. I feel like kids really get it, when something is unfair and that’s important as they will be running the world one day.“ There are ways to create stories that allow children to access quite deep and important things and because Sally is always trying to engage reluctant readers she makes the language really accessible and fast paced with fun illustrations. She loves that Polly & Buster is a great step up from Billie B Brown but is a great middle-man for kids not quite ready for books like Harry Potter, but are ready to take on these important themes without being overwhelmed.

“The first gift you can give a child is to share a love of reading. Just show them that it’s a joyful process. Don’t make it a chore. The easiest way to put kids off books is to bribe them that they can do something more fun after they have read!”

With tumbling rhymes and an infectious sense of humour, the weird and wonderful students at the School of Monsters are guaranteed to spark a love of reading! Thie first four books are out now from Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing. RRP $8.99