Reena Balding is a Tasmanian-born writer and composer. Her recent collection of bilingual children’s songs, called Ayo! Let’s Go! Songs for children in Indonesian and English, is written in both English and Indonesian. After living in Indonesia for seven years, Reena was inspired to introduce Indonesian words and phrases to her young sons through song. She is now based in Canberra, Australia, where she writes picture books, and teaches yoga to adults and children.
Ayo! Let’s Go! was launched at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in October 2016.
There will be a Canberra launch in mid January 2017.
Coming soon
A teachers guide for the CD will be available in 2017. This is a collaboration with an Australian primary school teacher who also spent a number of years in Indonesia.
Contact Reena for more information at reena.balding at gmail.com.
About the blog
I began this blog in 2014 when I was living in Bali. At that time I was very interested in the Indonesian language and the state of Indonesian language teaching in Australian schools. I did quite a lot of research into this, wondering how the songs and books that I was writing could be useful in an education setting. After a while I expanded to write more about children’s books in general. I’ve become more active with SCBWI since returning to Australia and am spending as much time as I can on submitting picture book manuscripts.
Some useful links
- Society for children’s book writers and illustrators – SCBWI
- Beta Lisboa – yoga practitioner and kids yoga teacher
- Songwriting: Writing the lyrics by Pat Pattison, Berklee College of Music – free (or almost) on Coursera
- The ACT Writers Centre
- Ubud Writers & Readers FestivalUbud Writers & Readers Festival
- Ganesha Bookshop Bali
- The Green School Shop
- Asia Bookroom
- Young Yoga Masters
- 12 X 12 Picture Book Writing Challenge
- Australian Society of Indonesian Language Educators
Hi Reena – welcome to the Balding Blogging Club! I think we’re the only two members – but that’s a start! I blog on LinkedIn and Tumblr as well as my monthly newsletter – – all related to my work of course. Can’t imagine you’ll be anything but great at it – think of an audience and go!
How’s things? Cheers!
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Thanks Cathy! There’s so many things to blog about, it took me a while to work out what I wanted to blog on. And then that is bound to change over the next six months. I’ll keep you updated!
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Hi Reena, I love your blog! I know it also took me years to decide on the focus of my blog – so many topics to write about – and it is still very much a work in progress. In fact, now that I’ve moved back to Canberra I’m going to repurpose it. Would love to join your blogging collective!
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A blogging collective is a great idea! Let’s meet up soon for some blog planning.
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By the way, am following your blog now, I love the subjects you’ve been writing about! Very interesting.
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