By: Jenaya, 18, Current Teen Ambassador
It’s around 5:45 pm on a Tuesday evening; Teen Ambassadors (TA)
Kadeem, Justin, Christina and I are trying to compile a list of projects to do
during the academic school year. Projects range from making videos to creating plays
that all speak about the Zoo and Teen Ambassador missions. The project we
brainstormed that sounded truly amazing was the creation of a children’s book. We
were extremely excited about making a book come to life. We started forming
many ideas but ultimately knew we wanted to base our book on biodiversity. However,
we immediately ran into a roadblock. How do we make a book fun yet informative
for children under the age of 12? Well,
the excitement and motivation we experienced that Tuesday evening was awesome! In
all honesty, we thought creating a children’s book would be a piece of cake –
that we would be done with the book in no time … WRONG! We were definitely not ready for what would
lie ahead.
It took an enormous amount of time to figure out the plan
for the book, just the plan! We ran
into many obstacles:
1.
How do we make the book fun and engaging for
children below the age of 12?
2.
Who was going to illustrate and how do we
illustrate?
3.
What would be the setting and plot of the book?
4.
Which animals would go on an adventure?
So many questions needed to be asked and answered! It was a
huge thought process and around midyear, we figured out the format for the book.
It was awesome to get to the point where we knew what we would be writing.
Towards the end of the academic school year, with the help of the rest of the
Teen Ambassadors, we all started to draft pictures of the animals we were going
to use and began working on the story line. However, June came around and it
was time to close out the first Teen Ambassador year before summer began. When
the second year of the TA program started, three new members – Arjanae, Isabelle,
and Randy – were ecstatic about the idea of continuing the book from the
previous year. The previous year’s teens however, all looked at each other with
the same stare that indicated how much work would need to be put into the
project. Ultimately, we all came to the conclusion that we wanted to finish the
children’s book.
As mentioned, all of the teens from the previous year had
worked extremely hard to bring the book to life. People who were great at
illustrations, drew the animals for the book. Teens who were good at
editing spent time editing the story line of the book. Everyone was contributing
to the book in their own way to make sure it would be complete! The day came
when our book was finalized and we had to pick a title. We came up with “The
Madagascan Adventure” … PERFECT!
