About My Presentations

When I reached Vancouver, I got onto the substitute teacher list by teaching French using high school French learned in Perth, Western Australia, a city so remote that it scarcely needed to offer French. With its high Italian population, it should have taught Italian instead.

However, French got me noticed and my next job for the Vancouver School Board was the Major Work Class, a group of eight-year-olds specially selected for their brains and potential leadership qualities. See Love Affair with a Cougar for that story.

I thank my Aussie upbringing and education as well as my grandmother’s genes and sense of adventure for surviving the challenges of my teaching career. They also helped me survive live television audiences in Canada when I was upstaged by such animal companions as a gibbon that lifted my wig during the interview, sprang onto the back of the cameraman and rode his camera around the floor, a raccoon that slurped down a bucket of crayfish on the host’s desk, demolished the fruit display then scampered off camera, and a coatimundi who used his sharp little claws to re-comb the hostess’s glamorous coiffure.

As a teacher, I couldn’t compete with the eagles, falcons, seals, sea lions, cougars, bears or a pesky macaw that I brought to my classrooms in Canada, so I made the animals our curriculum. You can read what the class audiences thought of all this in the poems and stories the kids wrote in my first four animal books. Mind you, the teachers and principals had different reactions. Well known writer Pierre Berton once told me, “Lyn, it doesn’t matter what people say about you, as long as they remember you.”

“Lyn’s ability to rivet an audience, be it 30 or 300, is legendary.”“Being a former teacher, Lyn quickly established a rapport with the children and sustained their interest at a high peak.”“You kept our ordinarily short-attention-spanned students spellbound for the entire hour of your talk. That is quite an accomplishment, believe me.”“I have taught for 30 years and by far this is the most stimulating presentation I have attended.”“Lyn was a teacher ahead of her time. Oh, what fun we had! And we learned something too.”

If you want to know read more of “What People Say About Lyn Hancock” and my presentations, click here. 

1. BOOKS BEGIN IN BACKYARDS: READING AND WRITING FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

(Illustrated by “There’s a Seal in my Sleeping Bag”, “There’s a Raccoon in my Parka”, “Love Affair with a Cougar”, “An Ape Came out of my Hatbox”, “Gypsy in the Classroom”)

• There’s A Raccoon In My Parka
• Love Affair With A Cougar
• An Ape Came Out Of My Hatbox
• Gypsy In The Classroom

Read and write about what fascinates you, what you are close to, what you are passionate about. You don’t have to go to the moon to find something to communicate. Fascination can  be found in your own backyard. I found my first inspiration for stories in my Vancouver backyard – literally- with seals and eagles, seabirds and cougars. 

Later, I found wild animals, even wild people, in the rest of Canada, the rest of the world. If you find something fascinating, you want to tell someone about it – in a diary, a letter or a book.

In my presentation, I don’t reveal everything you want to know i.e. how DID I get away with smuggling a raccoon across Canada on airplanes and in hotels and restaurants, but I read excerpts from the book and show pictures of our life together as we drive around BC, Alberta, and Washington on camping trips… as Tabasco pesters the apple pickers when we live in an Okanagan orchard, as we hang our Christmas presents on tree branches over a frozen river, as we….that’s enough, you can read more of our adventures in the book.

Here’s something unique. I show you the way Loraine Kemp, my awesome illustrator, and I work together as a team through the whole book. Authors and illustrators usually work separately. Not us. Loraine got a whole school, Anne McClymont Elementary in Kelowna,  to pose for the photos she uses as a step to her illustrations. Even the principal posed for one of the characters in the book. Everything is real in Tabasco’s book.

So, through a PowerPoint presentation, interesting stories, and displays of photos, letters, interviews, diaries, original artwork, and other research materials, I show the various stages in the life of this book.

In the workshops, I answer questions and discuss the writing process. Using examples from my book, evocative pictures, and illustrations, and articles written about Tabasco by other writers, I help you write your own story e.g. describe the raccoon having an adventure with you or making a mess in a place of your choosing, perhaps your bedroom, perhaps on a space ship to Mars. as I write from my own backyard, so can you.

Like many writers, I sometimes have what we call Writers’ Block and we just can’t think of what to put on that blank page or empty screen. Just in case it happens to you too, we warm up first with some practice. We learn about hooking the reader in the first sentence, writing graphically using similes, metaphors, active verbs, the six senses, accurate details, and realistic dialogue, then we check we have an arresting beginning, a detailed middle, and a satisfying ending. We read our stories to each other to check that what we write is understood by our readers – and listeners. We read them aloud. Always read your stories aloud to yourself and then to someone else. You’ll be amazed to find that what you think you wrote isn’t necessarily so! Tabasco and I want to help your language arts program after our presentation so you can download a 10-page activity booklet Some Things to Think About as you Read Tabasco the Saucy Raccoon. It contains questions, topics for research and discussion, links to the science and language arts curriculum, and a practical explanation of the writing and illustration process.

And get this! I give prizes for the best-illustrated stories from students that are inspired by my books. Just send them to me by email or snail mail and include your name, address, age and school.

If you give me permission, I will publish the best on this website.  The kids who played with Tabasco called her Dr. Goesinta the Dentist because with those dainty raccoon fingers she was always poking and probing into corners and crevices like a dentist prize into teeth.

3. NORTHERN ANIMALS, NORTHERN PEOPLE

(Illustrated by Nunavut, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Winging it in the North, The Mighty Mackenzie and selected articles published in major newspapers and magazines such as the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, Nature Canada, Above and Beyond, and Up Here.)

• Northwest Territories
• Northwest Territories: Last Frontier
• Yukon
• Nunavut
• Alaska Highway: Road to Adventure

I’ve been lucky enough to live and travel for more than 25 years across the whole of the northernmost part of Canada, almost as far north as the North Pole. We call this huge chunk of land North of Sixty, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. I wrote the first book on Nunavut before it actually became Nunavut. Look for it in your school library.

I have always been interested in life at the edge. I was born near the South Pole, so perhaps that’s why I’m interested in the North Pole. I went to the far north for the first time after my husband David Hancock asked me to be the first woman to cross the Northwest Passage in a tiny rubber boat. At that time in the 1960s only two other boats had succeeded in getting through the ice of the Northwest Passage.  They were ships, much bigger boats than ours. David abandoned the expedition but I stayed in the North and loved it.

In my northern slide presentation you will learn about some of the northern animals that I have encountered personally – caribou, polar bear, grizzlies, arctic fox, muskox, beluga whales, walrus – and the northern peoples – Dene, Metis and Inuit – who hunted and used them for food, clothing, tools, weapons, boats, homes,  arts and crafts. You will also meet some of my special northern friends and family.

Come with me when I am chased by a grizzly, stalk a polar bear as it hunts, kills and eats a walrus pup, when an arctic fox stalks me when I picnic on an ice floe with my Inuit neighbors during a walrus hunt and eat a walrus stew dinner laced with intestines, when I camp with Inuit sculptors as they carve legendary life-sized characters out of a marble beach when I overheat my seal-oil soapstone lamp and nearly melt my snow house, when as the only southern girl in an Inuit village of total winter darkness, I hang Christmas lights on a passing iceberg, eat a nightly Christmas dinner of the raw seal, frozen char, the semi-digested contents of a caribou and the blubber of a whale, then dance all night. Northern peoples use various parts of animals for many useful things. I bring one animal part to my presentation and ask you to guess what it is! Only two people have ever known the answer. You can find it in my book Winging it in the North.

In the workshops that follow the presentation, we may try on arctic clothing, play with animal packing dolls, play Inuit games, role-play jobs, interview pretends characters, write letters to my Dene, Metis, and Inuit families or do whatever you think will help you learn more about this amazing part of Canada. You will see why life at the top of the world is a magical place.

• Digital projector connected to a laptop, trolley and extension cord. I supply the thumb drive/flash drive or DVD.  Please discuss.
• Screen or white wall for viewing Power Point slide presentation
• Large free standing tack board (for displaying photos, newspaper articles and posters), 2 tables for display materials, and a couple of easels if presentation requires transportation by plane
• Microphone and speakers if the presentation is in the gym and if you think it necessary.
• Students should have pen and paper and questions or stories for small group sessions.