Friday 18th June 2021

Happy Friday Everybody!

Well, what a super Book Week we have enjoyed this year. Three fascinating authors gave up their time to visit us and share their inspiration and experience with us. Links to all their websites can be found below if you would like to find out more about them and their books.

On Tuesday, we were visited by Steve Clifford. Steve is a fiction writer and he joined us in the morning to introduce a writing challenge. After talking about a future time - when the world had succumbed to human destruction and the onset of an accelerated ice age - we had to write about how we would escape the terrors ahead. After Steve left, we were so engrossed in our writing task that we worked in complete silence. We were so inspired to write that even those of us who find writing tricky were really keen to write. Steve then revisited us during the afternoon, told us all about his books and listened to some of us reading out our very creative and imaginative pieces of writing.

The following day we very much enjoyed a visit from a second author, Christine Balit. Not only is Christine an author, but she is a very talented illustrator too. Prior to writing and designing the illustrations for her own novel, The Corinthian Girl, she had already worked as an illustrator on other authors' works. She showed us some of the artwork for books she had illustrated (it was fab) and then told us about The Corinthian Girl. It was so new, she only had one copy of it, which she brought in to show us. We were fascinated listening to her explaining how the artwork was developed and how she works closely with authors to create exactly the right pictures for their books, many of which were mythological stories, although the very first book she illustrated was a story by Michael Morpugo. She was also trained by Quentin Blake who is famous for illustrating many of Roald Dahl's novels.

Our third author of the week was Emma Rosen (not related to the children's author Michael Rosen), who originally trained as a marine biologist and then went on to teach biology at secondary school. Once she had young children of her own, she decided to start writing books for children based on her love of the oceans and the creatures that live in it. Her first book, 'Lily The Limpet Gets Lost', not only is a super little rhyming story for younger children, but also teaches us how to treat the creatures we might find in rock pools. She plans to write a whole series of these books, each one featuring a different marine creature as the main character. She tried to create the illustrations for her story herself, but then realised that her brother's wife, who is a trained illustrator, could do a better job than her. Not only did we learn the ways in which authors get their work published (Emma is a self-published author, so does everything herself), but we learnt much about life in the sea and how to take care of it.

Finally, we finished our fantastic Book Week with a session full of music and drama created for us by 'Pirate' Pete and Ramona from The Tales From The Book of Life. We clearly enjoyed this activity as you will see from the photos and videos below. As usual, we all loved dressing up for the final day of Book Week as you will see from the photo below.

A big 'Thank you' must go to Mrs Ferguson this week, for arranging all our visitors and making Book Week such fun for us all.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Mrs Godden and Mrs Short