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The Billy Series
Reading With Your Kids Podcast Featuring James Minter
At Reading With Your Kids Podcast, we strongly believe that books are a great resource we can use to teach our children. They can help our children through new stages of life. We also believe that in early childhood, children also acquire their values by watching the behaviour of their parents. From around eight years old onwards, children are driven by exploration, and seeking independence; they are more outward looking. It is at this age they begin to think for themselves, and are capable of putting their own meaning to feelings, and the events and experiences they live through. They are developing their own identity.
Today we are elated to have the opportunity to speak with author James Minter about his meaningful book series “The Billy Books” and their positive influence on children and literacy. Billy Books series is suitable for 7 to 9-year-old girls and boys. These are traditional stories, featuring negative behaviours but with positive outcomes.
James is a full time fiction author, writing for the last four years. Prior he spent 35 years in the IT industry and wrote on a wide range of IT subjects including many hundreds of training manuals. Born 1952 in Oxfordshire, UK, James is a dad to two grown-up children, and a step father to three more. His fiction writing career started some five years ago with books designed to appeal to the inner child in all of us – very English humour. Later his daughter Louise, reminded him of the bedtime stories he told her, and suggested he might like to commit them to paper for others to enjoy.
The Billy Books Collection:
Billy and his friends are children entering young adulthood, trying to make sense of the world around them. Like all children, they are confronted by a complex, diverse, fast-changing, exciting world full of opportunities, contradictions, and dangers through which they must navigate on their way to becoming responsible adults. What underlies their journey are the values they gain through their experiences. The Billy Books series support an initiative championing Values-based Education, (VbE) founded by Dr Neil Hawkes. The VbE objective is to influence a child’s capacity to succeed in life by encouraging them to adopt positive values that will serve them during their early lives, and sustain them throughout their adulthood.
Each story in the billy series also comes with a learning pamphlet for parent-child discussions, and an activity book chock-full of crossword and word-search puzzles, colouring activities, mazes and cryptograms that reiterate those important lessons while promoting literacy.
Tune in to this episode as James & Jed discusses The Billy Series. James explains how his books are perfect for shared-reading experiences between parents and children. He further talks about themes this series focuses on such as bullying, jealousy amongst friends, the consequences of telling a lie or stealing, and the burden of keeping secrets promotes discussion between children and adults and encourages children to adopt positive values.
James shares with us details about his book III of the Hole Trilogy – Marmite Makes a Sandwich, Dynamite Makes a Hole & more. Listen to find out what James has to say about preparing young children for their life journey through meaningful books like The Billy Series and you might be amazed!
Please visit Jame’s websites to find out more about him & his books:
Twitter: @james_minter
Check out The Great Martini, A fun and touching story about Sam, a lovable but far from perfect magician who learns that the greatest transformation is transforming feelings of caring into action to help another human being. The Great Maritini, as an exclusive amazon e book. Please click here to get your copy today.
