The Tales of Bailey and Nahla
How the real-life antics of two house pets helped two women create a burgeoning edutainment business
Meet Roz and Debbie
Debbie and I share similar backgrounds; we're from England and both of us made Aliyah, separately, over 35 years ago. We've been teaching for many years, working with native English-speakers and ESL (English as a Second Language) children, both in the school system and privately. Several years ago, we met at a networking group meeting and have always talked about developing a teaching business venture together. The Corona pandemic and resulting slowdown, was the catalyst we needed to take those first steps and begin to actively build a business.
Corona and our business idea
The business idea took shape around the fact that the world has irrevocably changed and nearly all our face-to-face communications, including learning, have gone online. In this brave new internet world we discovered that teachers everywhere were looking for online educational stories and materials to help them teach more effectively and productively in the ZOOM classroom environment. Utilizing our own online teaching experience and those of colleagues, we found that laughter and light-heartedness were important factors in keeping kids engaged and learning during these difficult times.It was then that we sensed that Roz's hilarious and ongoing stories of her real-life pets, her dog Bailey and her cat Nahla, were a perfect vehicle for teaching in this very challenging environment.
Who were the stories written for?
The stories of the crazy antics of Roz's pets were legendary amongst our friends and they became the base from which we developed our educational materials for 4th and 5th grade ESL students. At first we created only online story books and then quickly metamorphosed into a series of printed books and games. It was at this point that we realized there was also a need in the market for reading materials suitable for the 3rd generation of immigrants living in Israel. From personal experience, having kids of our own who were fully fluent in both English and Hebrew, we noticed that this second generation were more comfortable speaking Hebrew to their own children. They, in effect, created Hebrew-speaking households for their own children and produced both a communications challenge and a learning opportunity between the English-speaking grandparents and their Hebrew-speaking grandchildren. In this case, grandparents can read our stories to nearly any child in grade school and create a stronger bond between the generations.
Our years of teaching experience have proven to us that children love reading about real-life situations and thus all our stories were written with this theme in mind. Our stories and games ignite the children's imagination and help to improve their reading skills. The Memory card game and Happy Families reinforce the vocabulary in the books, as well as helping them gain confidence and encourage conversation.
Meet the world of Bailey and Nahla
We invite you to discover the world of Bailey and Nahla and what readers, young and old, will encounter. To date, we have six stories in our series, based on the lives of Roz, her three daughters - Alexi, Danielle and Laura - their dog Bailey and the newest addition to the family, Nahla the cat.The tales follow the everyday antics of Nahla and the mischief and trouble she gets into. Bailey does not approve of her behavior and is often blamed for her misdemeanors.
The first story introduces Nahla into the family and Bailey learns very quickly that he's fighting for his territory. In subsequent books in our series, you'll read about Nahla's visit to the neighbor's house and stealing food off the counter, a trip to the park and getting stuck in a tree.In addition, Roz's family continually has to rescue Nahla from the neighbor's roof and is forever apologizing to the neighbors. Needless to say, everyone in the building knows Nahla very well.
We look forward to welcoming you, your children and grandchildren into the warm-hearted and funny world of 'Bailey and Nahla'. We are busy developing and writing more books and games in the series and look forward to your family joining our readers' family.
You can learn more here: www.debbiebanglit.com/the-tales-of-bailey-and-nahla
or contact Roz on 052 619 7363 or Debbie on 052 228 3459.
Comments