Dear reader,
It was a great honour when I was chosen to be the 2011–2013 Children’s Laureate. Here is a summary of what I did in that role:
Encouraging children to act and to read aloud
During the 20 or so years that I’ve been visiting schools and libraries and performing in book festivals and theatres, I’ve discovered how much children enjoy participating in stories – acting parts in them, and joining in choruses.
As well as being fun, performing is, in my opinion, tremendously good for children’s confidence. So I wanted to create at least one laureate legacy in this area, and in fact created four.
They are:
- a website with lots of ideas to help teachers to dramatise picture books with their classes
- Poems to Perform: an anthology of poems by a wide range of authors, all suitable for reading aloud by more than one voice, and some lending themselves to performance by a whole class
- “Plays to Read”: I’ve seen how much play-reading improves children’s reading skills, so I was delighted to collaborate with the publishers Pearson on a series of 60 fun short plays with parts for six characters. I wrote a third of the plays myself, and the others were written by various distinguished children’s authors, including Geraldine McCaughrean and Jeanne Willis
- “Plays to Act”: Again working with Pearson, I devised a series of plays with parts for a whole class, each one based on a well-known picture book, including Ed Vere’s Mr Big and A New Home for a Pirate by Ronda Armitage and Holly Swain