(upbeat music)
- So after spending about 10 years in the classroom
with a bunch of tweens from third grade,
fourth grade, and fifth grade,
I started to see that a lot of kids were dealing
with a lot of pressure to be perfect.
And this was not made easy by social media
and all the different challenges that they have now
that we didn't necessarily grow up with
when we were younger.
And I find that kids are really hesitant
to try something new and they're really scared
to kind of disappoint other people,
or they're trying really hard to just kinda keep up with
what everyone else is doing,
even though, maybe in their heart,
they kind of wanna do something different
or express a different part of theirselves.
So I found just as a generation,
that this was a message I wanted to tell young people.
That, hey, it's fine.
You do you.
It's okay if it's not perfect,
it's okay if it looks different from someone else.
And so as an educator,
I just wanted to impart that message in my books.
Oh, absolutely not.
Totally not.
I was such a nerd.
It was probably my repressed,
like I wish I could have been a class clown.
I had the jokes all in my head,
but I was far too afraid to ever say them out loud.
So in a lot of ways, I am like Yumi.
A ton.
Yes, I had a lot of jokes that didn't make it into the book.
I could probably write a book of discarded jokes
and they're not good, so you'll never hear them.
There are so many great activities
that the kids do in the book from their comedy camp.
And there's so many wonderful improv scenarios
that kids can act out where it causes them
to kind of be on their feet and work together
as a team and as a group and I think
that could be really powerful in the classroom, also.
I think it would not only be a way for kids
to express themselves,
but also a way for them to kind of learn
to rely on each other and trust each other and be a team.
So I think there's a lot of really wonderful ways
that we could use comedy and this book in the classroom.