Had an awesome time on Thursday, invited by Mangere East Library to come for an “author visit”. Always love encouraging young people and their families with their reading, letting them know reading can be fun and interesting. Much love and respect to all the librarians, teachers and family members trying their best to inspire young people. Humble, unknown work but you never know what will happen to those seeds you plant.
We’re nearly halfway through term one of the school year and it’s a good time to remind the young people we live and work with, and ourselves, that being successful isn’t about talent or gifts. It’s about learning, working with the right people and hard work. Kemba Walker is a basketball player. Kemba led his…
My youngest daughter enrolled in Auckland Libraries’ summer reading program back in early December. We started off well, reading every day for 20 minutes as a whole family 🙂 But then Christmas came and New Years and holidays away and we stopped reading as a family for a while. I’ve just finished reading two books…
Some people think the only place you’ll see women at a racetrack is dressed in bikinis, waving start flags and spraying champagne on the winners. You won’t find Jodie Donovan doing any of that. She’s been drifting for more than a decade and is one of the best female drifters in the world. Jodie rode…
I wanted to be a writer when I was a child but I didn’t believe in myself because I thought writers were famous people from places like LA and New York. Not David Riley from Mangere! One of my goals now is to encourage young people that those kinds of thoughts aren’t true. This term…
The New Zealand government announced earlier this year that it will soon be compulsory to teach New Zealand history in our schools. Every child in Germany learns about the Holocaust – the terrible atrocities which Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people. “We teach every chapter of German history,” a German friend of…
It’s Cook Islands Language Week and we’re celebrating by sharing a little about some of the inspirational Cook Islanders featured in my book Cook Islands Heroes. The aim of this book is to inspire Kuki Airani young people and anyone else who loves reading stories of people who overcame great challenges to achieve their goals in life….
