Gianni Amarmy

Yes, I know it is an unusual name. Last year my company dealt with Greta Gridcen, an anagram of Greeting Card, so I thought I'd do the same this time, hence Gianni Amarmy. I will leave it for the class to solve. I think they will if I give enough hints. Last year it took them a whole term to realise it was an anagram!
I know we don't actually have to produce something for Mantle of the Expert to be successful, but I just have to! I can't not! This is such a cool opportunity to create a real thing, that is professional looking and well researched and full of the super creative ideas that the children have, and we really are making a book. And we would have made one anyway, even if the children hadn't been asking about making one, because why not? We are authors!
Gianni Amarmy has written to the company with a request (yes, the commission) for a children's picture book to be written and illustrated, about the sea urchin, kina barrens and marine reserves. His letter was delivered by the postie - she actually came into the classroom to deliver it to Mildred and the kids were all stunned, they were like, "that's our postie" and, "how did she know where Tales Up was?" and, "how did she know we'd be here in What If?"
And I was like, "Wow, I know! Amazing! She must have seen our advertising or something," while thinking how funny my class are.
So before opening the letter they had already decided that it must be from Chris Gurney, but changed their minds when I pointed out that we haven't sent our letters to her yet. They struggled with the fancy old fashioned font I used on the envelope (one I reused as it already had a postmark and stamp on it) so I read the return address out to them. Gianni Amarmy? Who could that be? Does anyone know a Gianni Amarmy? Hamish thought his next door neighbour might be called Gianni, or something like that. So we all sat around the conference table and took turns at reading the lengthy letter with old fashioned language that we had to keep stopping and looking up in the dictionary to decipher (words like peruse and entrepreneur) and eventually figured out that no, it couldn't be Hamish's neighbour. We voted on whether or not to go ahead with the commission. Regan said, "well, it will be our first real client so I think it would be silly to turn him down," and for those of us that know Regan, I was pretty pleased with him speaking up like that. So the class voted unanimously to go ahead with it, and then they started planning the illustrations for the main character. A kina.

The letter from Gianni, I'd include the real copy but it is very long and waffly!

A cute little kina is created!

Some illustrators like to work on the floor in our company.

As you can see, we have been working on shading with our sketching pencils in art, so many of the kina are shaded, because they are like a squashed sphere, and we know how to shade a sphere and a cube so far!

Note that the draft has arms, and the other one does not!

Every sketch needs a sun, so you can figure out the light and shadowed areas!

And Jacob's ideas have no shading, one looks like a hairy Jack Skellington, and the other like a bearded golliwog, but he was fully focused the whole time, and I am proud of him for persevering!

And after all of that, I had a child ask me if the letter was real. And being the lovely, patient, caring person I am, I said, "What do you think?" No, I didn't really, although I admit I felt like it. I also remembered how important it was to reinforce the difference between real and pretend and so we went over looking at the What Is / What If world on the board and the 3 clicks I had done prior to being in the imaginary company, and reminded them that even though the letter was a tangible object that we can touch and see, it was made especially for us to keep our pretending going. I'm nice like that. Sometimes.