 Hi everyone, my name is Steph and this is Little Bookish Teacher and today I'm here to share a review of Backyard Footy by Carl Merison and illustrated by Samantha Campbell. This is a really gorgeous picture book. I believe this is the first book in a series that Carl Merison is writing. He was the recipient of the Black and Right Fellowship in 2020 for the series premise and so this is the first book that has been released. This was very kindly sent to me by Hachette for review. I'm very grateful to have read it because I'm always on the lookout for First Nations Indigenous Picture Books that really deal with and showcase the amazing culture and the amazing places around Australia and this one is clearly a celebration of footy or if you are not from Australia AFL which is the Australian Football League and is very very popular around the country. So this book is set in the Kimberley region and it really celebrates fun and friendship and the fact that playing footy together is better than playing it by yourself and the blurb says footy by yourself is fun but playing with mates is better. Jai is playing football alone in his small backyard in the Kimberley but when he accidentally kicks the ball over the fence a footy adventure begins and it says the first book in a joyful black and right fellowship winning series where the fun only grows with friends and family and that's exactly how the story goes. It literally builds as the football goes over one fence and so suddenly two people are playing and then it goes over the fence again and suddenly there are three people playing and it has that really joyful nature of everyone just jumping in and enjoying their time with one another no matter who they are, no matter what they look like, no matter whether they're the best of friends at school or outside of school they can all play footy together and it's just a really gorgeous book. When I was thinking about how this could be used in the classroom there are plenty of opportunities for this to be a read aloud but also a read aloud with discussions around the connections that you make. Do you like football? Do you know anything about football? What sort of things do you like to play with your friends etc so there is a lot of opportunities to explore those connections with kids and they will probably come up with things that you don't even think about because the illustrations are incredibly detailed and so there are things that they might go oh hang on I've been outside sitting with my family and someone's kicked a football on the table and everything's gone flying so it's really great for that because there's a lot happening on every page. I think it's also a really good one to use as a jumping off point to have kids identify the indicators of friendship and what does it mean to be a friend and what does it mean to play well with others. You could also use this as a comparison for places where students who are reading this book are living so this is the Kimberley region so it'd be a great opportunity to pull up a map and look at where the Kimberley region is and then compare it to where they are and I mean I think about my setting. The students that I teach we are in a very suburban city area which is very very different to the Kimberley region so suddenly we can start making those comparisons and look at contrast and look at what is similar and what is different between those two places. It's a really great way to explore the sport of footy or AFL. There is very specific footy language so you can build that in particularly if kids are not familiar with the sport or you have EAL students who may never have seen it or people from different countries who have never seen the sport. It's a great way to talk about what actually is the game and why do people really enjoy it here. There is a lot of repetition of very simple words which makes it a great text for younger readers to access independently while also still being a really fun read and also I talk about this a lot. The book is just joyful and I think that is so important to have in a picture book. Thank you again to Heshet for sending this to me. I'm so excited about this book and about future books that might be coming out in the series. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out for them. I will leave links to where you can find out more information about the book down below. If you're planning on picking it up feel free to let me know otherwise feel free to leave a football emoji down below. I know it will not be an AFL football because we do not have those in emojis but any kind of football will do. I hope that wherever you are in the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.