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…
Caramel Hearts… or don’t melt chocolate in a microwave…
I have an interesting book review to write tonight because it’s also a write-up of an experiment with one of the recipes in the book. So it’s a double review, if you like! The book in question is Caramel Hearts, written by E.R. Murray, and if you like YA fiction with some baking thrown in,…
The pets’ story of World War II
Much is known about daily life in Britain during World War II: the rationing, the bombing, the evacuation of thousands of children from the cities to the countryside. A less-well-known aspect, however, was the destruction of thousands of beloved family pets just before war was officially declared on Germany. People were urged to have their…
Can fantasy cause mental illness in children?
You’ve probably heard about the storm an English headteacher has caused by declaring that fantasy novels, such as the Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games, can cause mental illness in children. Graeme Whiting, headteacher at the Acorn School in Gloucester, said in a recent blog post that the aforementioned books:…
