'You Ready?' Multilingual Children’s Storybooks series

The project aims to develop a series of four 'You Ready?' multi-lingual children's storybooks in Hindi, Chinese, Samoan and Te Reo Māori. The series follows a group of friends as they face dangerous weather events and natural disasters. From cyclones and tornadoes to flash floods and thunderstorms, the children use their quick thinking, knowledge and resilience to prepare for and stay safe in emergencies. The characters take you to different communities – Māori, Samoan, Hindi and Chinese – and teach you how to get ready too.

Preparedness tool to engage tamariki

As children and young people are agents of change, this makes them not only future leaders of the community, but current leaders to influence and encourage their families, schools, peers and others on the importance of emergency preparedness.

These children’s storybooks can not only help children understand and prepare for these emergencies but also create opportunities for parents or grandparents to engage with their tamariki, sharing their cultural oral stories and traditions, while building knowledge for themselves and whanau about severe weather events like storms and floods.

Books designed by children for children

We engaged with four different community groups which comprised of children and adults from each community to work on their own cultural story. The four community groups are

• Sutton Park School – writing the Samoan story
• Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Te Kotuku – writing the Maori story
• Waitakere Hindi School – writing the Hindi story
• New Zealand Multicultural Arts & Sports Centre – writing the Chinese story

The workshops for each group involved writing the story, disaster preparedness, and design and illustration workshops. Each of the groups was also guided through the story-writing and design process by a children’s story-writing teacher and a design and animation teacher.

Hindi community working group

Samoan community working group

Te Reo Maori community working group

Chinese community working group

Coming soon

The storybooks are under development and will be updated here once ready. Follow our Facebook and X (Twitter) channels to receive the latest updates.