Lancaster school counselor, children’s book author and Lehighton Area School District alumnus Mike Resh paid a visit to Mahoning and Shull-David elementary schools on Friday to teach a little about creativity, words and friendship.

Resh’s book “Dneirf,” which came out in November, helps address a little-recognized issue that children experience with their own pals.

“It’s the word ‘friend’ spelled backward,” he said. “I wrote the book as a resource for kids, students, teachers and school counselors. I realized that there were a lot of good resources in terms of bullying, but there weren’t a lot of resources for helping kids deal with normal conflict that they deal with in their friendships.”

During his presentation, Resh explained the process of writing a book to the students, including developing a story, finding someone to do the illustrations and getting published. Sprinkled throughout the lecture were some fun activities, and a bit of magic to go along with it.

Resh told the kids all about his very first book, which was about a boy that wanted to befriend a bubble. Unfortunately, his attempts to get close to the bubbles always ended poorly, until Resh demonstrated how his protagonist kept one around.

“My favorite part was when he had the bubble, and it froze,” Brandon Adams, 6, said.

As “Dneirf” is filled with palindromes and semordnilaps, which are words that create whole new words when spelled backward, Resh gave the students a crash course in both concepts.

“A palindrome is a word that when you spell it backward, it’s the same word when you spell it forwards. For example, this guy right here, you remember what his name is?” he said as he pointed to a cutout of his book’s main character.

“Otto!” the crowd said.

“Now, if I spell Otto backward, it’s O-T-T-O, it’s the same word. So, I challenged myself in writing this book to fill the book with lots of palindromes. They’re all the words that are here in red. My illustrator even hid some of them in the illustrations,” Resh said.

Some of those palindromes include favorites like “taco cat,” “evil olive” and “too hot to hoot.” In fact, the very last page of “Dneirf” has a whole sentence as a palindrome — “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”

Examples of semordnilaps included “dneirf” and “friend,” “pets” and “step,” and Resh’s personal favorite, “stressed” and “desserts.”

Toward the end of the presentation, Resh invited two students to help him create a brand-new story. After polling the class to come up with a problem and a location, something lost in the park, he needed help to create a main character.

While flipping through a split sketchbook featuring separate sections for hair, eyes and mouths, he asked volunteer Adams when to stop on each page.

“Alright, so now I need a name for this character,” he told the students, who began thinking out loud with a series of ‘uhhhs,’ which turned out to be just the right name. “Perfect, I love it, ‘Uhhh.’ Here’s the best part. I knew that I was going to meet Brandon today, and I knew that he was going to create a book with a character named ‘Uhhh,’ so when I eating lunch today before I came here, I actually took a copy of this guy right here that he picked, and I put it in the envelope right here. Do you believe me?” he asked.

While some doubted Resh’s precognizance, all were shocked when Camryn Norweiler, 7, opened the envelope to reveal none of than Uhhh.

With all the fun and games, the kids actually were able to pick up on a few valuable lessons as well, such as keeping an eye on how they interact with others, and how it can affect their friends.

“The mindset of the book is to change the direction of their behavior. I hope that they process things and think about how to do things going forward,” Resh said.

Norweiler took that lesson to heart, and found it to be her favorite part of the story.

“It was fantastic. I liked when he was angry and he started to turn himself around. You should control your anger,” she said.

At the end of the presentation, Resh made sure to give some advice and encouragement to the students, telling them to use their imaginations, dream big, and create stories, art, or anything else that they may choose.

“But, the biggest thing you guys can do is believe in yourselves, and keep working hard, even when things don’t go your way,” he said. “Keep on writing, keep on drawing, keeping on doing whatever it is you love, whether it’s a sport or whatever, and maybe one day you’ll have the opportunity to come back to your elementary school and share what you did.”