From Home School to Public School with Veera Hiranandani

This week’s Story Seeds collaboration follows Veera Hiranandani, author of the Newbery Honor winning novel The Night Diary, and 10 year old creative rockstar Willa! 

Veera Hiranandani helps Willa grow this story seed about:

A girl and her mom live in the middle of the woods in a small cottage. She's never gone to school but she's learned all her school subjects through her surroundings. Suddenly, they were beginning to lose money, so her mom decides that she needs to get a job, and her daughter needs to go to a real school. This is a huge change for her, and she has to find a way to fit in in her new school.

Follow Veera and Willa's Story Seeds adventure with host Betsy Bird as they: 

• Meet in person and go on a tour of Willa’s school, The Blue School, in downtown New York City
• Brainstorm ideas for Willa’s story seed and compare notes about their school experiences
• Chat about the importance of names and what it feels like to be a fish out of water
• Hash out the inciting incident

The episode concludes with this week’s storytime segment (13:00) where our featured author, Veera Hiranandani, reads the story she grew from Willa’s story seed: Under the Maple Tree

Books mentioned in this episode: The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani.  

Calls to Action

Bonus Episode: Check back next week to hear Betsy's interview with Veera Hiranandani. You’ll  get to hear about how she made her start as a writer and her secret connection to Dora the Explorer!

Kids: Call The Story Seeds Hotline at 646-389-5153, email us at [email protected], or visit our website to submit your story ideas. You can also join The Story Seeds Society, our kids listeners club! 

Get our Imagination Lab: Experiments in Creativity activity book! It pairs perfectly with the podcast and features tons of episode-inspired prompts and projects! Order your copy here!

Grownups: Visit www.storyseedspodcast.com for subscription links, to sign up for our newsletter, and to download our printable activity e-zines for your kids (or the  kid in you!). You can also follow us on Instagram @storyseedspod, on Twitter @litsafarimedia, and on Facebook @literarysafari. 

This episode is also available on YouTube. Subscribe here. 

Show credits: Produced and written by Sandhya Nankani and Anjali Sakhrani. Kayla Fedeson is our Associate Producer. Scoring, mixing, and sound design is by Ania Grzesik and Matt Boynton of Ultraviolet Audio. Field audio was recorded by Julia Botero. Our host is Betsy Bird. 

Music by Andrew VanWyngarden, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/musician and co-founder of MGMT

The Story Seeds Podcast is a creation and production of Literary Safari www.literarysafari.com