We Brought the Island Moon to Balete: Our First Literacy Tour Stop

A classroom in the Philippines. A book born from the sea.

There is something that happens when a child sees themselves in a story for the first time. Not a story about someone who looks vaguely like them, or a character whose name sounds almost familiar. A story that holds their world with both hands and says: this was made for you.

That is what we witnessed this week at Balete Integrated School.

The Island Moon Literacy Tour made its first stop at Balete, a school tucked in the Philippines that holds a very particular significance for this universe. It is the school where our illustrator, Kim Jasper Billones, was once a student. The school that shaped the hands that would one day paint Maharaya and Mahinaʻala into existence.

Why Balete had to be first.

When we began imagining what the Island Moon Literacy Tour could be, there was never any question about where it would start. Balete is not just a school. For Kim, it is the place where someone first told him that the things he could see in his mind were worth putting on paper. It is where the artist began.

To bring The Twin Mermaids of the Island Moon back to those same walls felt less like a school visit and more like a homecoming. The book went back to where its images were first imagined, carried by the same hands that drew every coral reef, every scale, every moonlit tide in its pages.

Kim stood in front of children who sit in the same seats he once sat in. And he showed them what those seats had made possible.

This is what literacy looks like.

Reading literacy is not only the ability to decode words on a page. It is the experience of finding that words on a page were written with you in mind. Children who encounter that experience early read more, dream more, and carry a particular kind of confidence into every classroom they ever enter afterward.

The Island Moon Literacy Tour exists to give that experience to as many children as possible, beginning in the very communities this book was born from.

Balete Integrated School was the beginning. There is so much more to come.

Bring the story home.