Over the past month or so, I’ve received several interesting books from Templar/Bonnier Publishing that combine reading and creating. The first two are Harry Potter Quidditch and Harry Potter House Elves: which are part of a series of four books looking at aspects of the Harry Potter films and books. Each book comes with a…
Clever cat?
As a cat lover, I know that cats can be very clever… … but also very silly. In I Am a Very Clever Cat, author and illustrator Kasia Matyjaszek shows these two sides in a joyful and humorous way, though admittedly Stockton the cat errs on the side of silly. Despite his claims that he…
A Pantheist Poem for National Poetry Day
Today, 6 October 2016, is National Poetry Day and Twitter is full of celebrations for everything from best-loved verses to unusual and little discovered gems.In the spirit of the day, I thought I would share a silly sonnet I wrote as part of an Open University course, which is a take-off of a well-known Shakespearean…
Hip-hop happy birthday, Roald Dahl!
Today has been a brilliant day for children’s literature. One of the top trends on Twitter was #RoaldDahlDay and schools, bookshops and libraries all over the country celebrated what would have been Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday. For the past couple of weeks, this friendly fellow has decorated our library wall at school: which Holly helped…
Kitty-Kitty Bang-Bang
I was so excited when I received my mail on Thursday morning. Inside a padded Jiffy bag was a book I’d been waiting a long time for. Not quite 150 years, but quite a few months. The book in question was The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots by Beatrix Potter, discovered 150 years after her birth and…
Review: Midnight at the Zoo
There was Night at the Museum, and now there’s Midnight at the Zoo! The gist: Max and Mia are very excited about their upcoming visit to the zoo with their school. However, when the big day arrives, their nerves force them to hang at the back of the lines while the other children charge forward….
Finding the superhero in you
With the Olympics filling our screens at present, and with the marvellous achievements and commitment all athletes are displaying, what better time to review Sophy Henn’s new picture book Pom Pom is Super!? Published on 4 August, this is the latest instalment in the Pom Pom series, but my first introduction to the loveable Panda….
One Dog and His Boy – a book that is hard to get your teeth into
I am trying to catch up on all the books I’ve been reading over the past few months now that I have (a little) time over the summer, away from the Library where I work. One that I wanted particularly to review was One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson. I first encountered this…
My Kingdom for a Cake!
Anyone who walked into the primary school where I work last week would have been forgiven for thinking that it was a bakery because of all the marvellous cakes brought in to celebrate our annual reading challenge – Cakespeare! Every year we run a whole-school competition for the children to enter, based on a theme…
T’was the night before Cakespeare…
Tomorrow sees the closing date of our annual school challenge based on books. The idea is for the children to get creative about an element of reading and this year we’re doing… drum roll please… Cakespeare! You may be able to guess from this stunning play on words (!) that we have challenged the children…
It could have happened in a book
but it didn’t. It happened here and however much 48% of us wished it went the other way, we woke up to a country we scarcely recognised on June 24 2016. I am talking of course of the Brexit Referendum, which has been splashed over newspapers and news sites around the world since the shock…
A book about children that is not for children
The Writing for a Child Audience module on my MA said that the age of the protagonist(s) in a book determined the age of the intended audience. And if the main character of a book was a child, chances are that the book is written for children. So a story featuring a child aged 12-13…
