Neat time at the NZ Book Festival with some creative authors ...

Claire Bunt, author and teacher

I had a neat time at the NZ Book Festival in Mt Eden yesterday meeting lots of authors (many of whom we'd met at the festival last year) and I will be blogging about some of the creative authors I met and some of their stories. One of whom I'll introduce to you today as children's author, Claire Bunt.

She is an amazing woman in that we shared similar stories as she was a teacher at Mangere Intermediate when I was there as a student between 1977 - 1978. Although, I wasn't taught by her I vaguely remembered her on staff.

There I had a teacher in my first year, called Mr John Toetoe, who was a handsome young Maori teacher that many girls/ladies liked but boy was he strict, however, I think he had a soft spot for me and encouraged me to do by best in my school work when I was slacking off and he loved for us to run around the large field as our fitness.

He was also good at teaching us Maths and I began to excel in Maths from his class through to High school. He was one teacher whom I'll never forget and Claire Bunt also remembered him and other teachers at the times that we were both there.

Claire Bunt writes children's books and also sends them off to Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands for free by the box for children in schools to read. She has such a neat heart for communities and also supports UNICEF. In fact, she even gave me a couple of books for to read to our youngest child and was very blessed by her.

The two neat books that I read are featured at the front of her stand as: "A Day of Surprises" and "The Green Hat that blew away" both are from the "Life in the Solomon Islands" series and beautifully illustrated by Philip Webb. She also has another book called "Whatever happened to Milo?" and these stories have literacy activities associated to them.

And looking forward to sharing many more stories of neat authors that I met throughout the week...