Monster Boy – Siren Spell – let Shoo read you the story!

I’ve been so busy recently, that I’ve not been posting my latest Drawing School Videos. Anyway, to celebrate the publishing of the last Monster Boy books in paperback, here is a video of me reading the complete story of Monster Boy – Siren’s Spell.

Hope you enjoy it. It is also up on my site at www.shoo-tube so you can watch it in school, where it should get through the filters, and you can also see it on Teachertube.com.

You can buy signed copies at my online shop or you can get them from amazon.

Windwhistle Primary School Library Opening

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I had a brilliant day today. Jenny Harpur, Deputy Head of the wonderfully named Windwhistle Primary School in Weston Super, Mare invited me to officially open the new school library which she has been planning and arranging and building and stocking and getting ready over the last two or three years.

I got the easy part, cutting the ribbon and letting everyone in!

I spent the rest of the day storytelling to all the different groups in the school.

I was really pleased that I’d had yet another edit to my Naughty Girl story that I’ve mentioned before. I had a go at it last night and it seems to be really coming together. I’ve read it a few times in schools over the last few weeks and each time I get a new insight.

I think, after about ten years, I’m almost there with it now. I read it to year 2 and the nursery. No one was scared too much which was good!

Thanks all of you for a wonderful and fabulously sunny day. Enjoy your Library – I’m sure you will!

Why bother reading books or keeping libraries?

I just caught the end of an interview with Michael Rosen on breakfast TV this morning. He was asked why we should bother to read books now that reading is going over to Kindles and iPads.

He hesitated a moment, the same way I hesitated last week when asked for a quote by the Hereford Times, on wether I thought Libraries were important. I’d just been posing for photograhs in the new Garway School Library. I’d cut the ribbon to open it and was feeling full of the joys of spring.

“So, Mr Rayner, can you tell me why you think why books and libraries are important?”

…it’s so obvious that there isn’t a clear answer that doesn’t sound like a well-used soundbite that justifies keeping open expensive institutions. And as for books – who needs them when everything you need is all online for free?

There is something about a book. It is an object with a life of its own, unlike an electronic file that can be stored anywhere and easily corrupted. It takes time to make a book. If well edited, it is an accessible chunk of someone else’s brain. It’s a considered thing, with an obvious beginning, middle and end. It doesn’t flit about from page to page and the batteries never run out. It even works in candlelight. A book is the quickest way into the mind of another person. It’s a time machine. It is knowledge hard won by our forebears, hard won and easily lost. The book is a wonderful thing.

But I’d rather go to an online source for factual knowledge than an out of date encyclopaedia. The book is not everything.

But there is something about a book – it’s very physical presence – that lets you read the text in a one-to-one conversation with the author, in your own time, at your own pace. This doesn’t happen on the screen where all text is homogenised and links want you to jump about, leaving the considered argument half way. Electronic text looks and smells the same and is delivered within the same unit every time. Books have an extra life – a smell, texture, weight and age.

I don’t think the book will disappear. Printing a book lends authority to the author (that’s where the word comes from). Buying a book says something about who you are that is different to a browser history of links.

And what of Libraries? Without them, what are we as human beings? Without Libraries there would have been no civilisation. Now we have Libraries in abundance we feel we can afford to lose a few, but where do we stop? When the Barbarians are warming their hands on the burning books?

Cwmaman Infants

I had a wonderful day with Cwmaman Infants today. The school is hidden way up at the top of the valley. I almost felt I was coming to the top of a fiord in Norway. Cwmaman is the home of the Stereophonics and this was the school they went to!

I read Little Horrors to year one and then we tried to come up with a new idea the the children could write after I’d left based on the Little Horrors stories and characters. I’m not going to share with you the idea we came up with, because I think I might see if I can develop it myself!

I did painting a d drawing with reception and the Just so Stories with year one. I managed to get most of them to get up and dance the hornpipe, as does the man of infinite resource and sagacity. As ever, my small, but very useful penknife was much admired!

Afterwards the year ones were making Welshcakes to take on a school trip to St Fagins on Friday. Everytime I’ve had Welshcakes before,they have been at least a day old and probably older. I was allowed to sample a fresh cake, straight off the “hot stone”. It really was delicious and the best I’ve ever tasted. Just as they should be eaten, still warm. They are cooked on a very low heat, slowly turning them and moving them around until they are cooked. Yum!

Thanks everyone for a wonderful day.

St Margaret’s Primary – Aberdare

St Margaret’s Primary in Aberdare, South Wales, is quite a small school. I was pleased of this as I was quite tired by the end of this week of school visiting. Smaller group sizes means less projecting to a large audience, so today’s sessions were much more intimate.

I was impressed by one writer in year five. She had written several redemption stories about Paris Hilton. In each story, Paris would be kidnapped by such inanimate objects as cheesey puff balls and staple guns, and saved from spending ridiculous amounts of money on handbags! She will go far with an imagination like that.

I had a lovely day there, and thanks to all for making me feel so welcome.

All my visits are part of the Rhondda, Cynon Taf are part of their Improving writing skills through developing pupil oracy project. We met up for a chat with storyteller, Daniel Morden and poet Francesca Kaye at Esis, the local education resource centre. Here they had the fabulous Bro Mahogany Male Voice Choir, pictured below, on show. It was carved by Hugh Roberts and took eighteen months to carve.

AND – is not a connecting word!

So often, when reading children’s writing, I come across the word, and. When I challenge the children about it, they tell me it’s a connecting word. Well, I say it’s an adding word. It adds sentences together, like a sticky, gunky goo, making them grow longer and longer, and windier and windier.

What’s wrong with a full stop? Often, replacing and with a full stop adds pace to a story. It increases the sense of action. Give me short, snappy sentences – any day!

My First iPhone eBook!

Hooray! My first iphone eBook app is now available at the itunes store to download to your iPhone and read on the go. Millie and Bombassa – Dizzy DIY is a story I wrote and Illustrated for Scholastic, but is unfortunately unavailable in print. It is still one of my most borrowed books from libraries.

The iPhone version is published by SleepyDog, who are boldly going forward into this new and exciting format for children’s books.

Bombassa is a sleepy old rhino who would rather spend the day in bed drinking tea, and Millie is a bright little bird who would rather he got up and did something. A bit like the voices in my head when I wake up in the morning really!

Click the video above to see how it works and hear me read the first chapter – enjoy!

If you are getting this as a feed and can’t see the video, click here to go to the video

Chronic Phonics Cook The Books

“If we are uncritical, we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.”

Karl Popper

I’m indebted to yesterday’s Times’ leader article for giving me the quote above and introducing me to Karl Popper, who I think I might investigate a bit more.

I was watching a Teacher’s TV video by Michael Rosen yesterday, in which he expounds the reading of whole books for pleasure to raise reading skills. Well, Duh! it’s a no brainer.

Some of the comments below the video are quite vicious, this is because Michael swiftly and surely demolishes the whole synthetic phonics movement with a quiet, thoughtful, almost saintly, air that is calculated to upset the “other side”.

I think some children probably do respond brilliantly to phonics – but some children do not. It is inconvenient for the phonics promoters to remember that the Clackmannanshire Study, that we base English children’s literacy lessons on, ran alongside a huge family support programme which must have had some benefit too. Children who do not do well with phonics need something else or they will be left behind – as we are seeing in current falling literacy levels.

Storytelling is the one consistent habit of humans, from the stone age to the present. The learning of the art of reading needs context. Yes, we need to be able to read electricity meters and letters from the council, but who wants to spend their whole day doing that when they can learn to read Harry Potter instead?

If reading is all about decoding, then what is the point?

A brilliant story, well written or told, captures the imagination like nothing else. Politicians know this, religions know this, advertisers know this – education seems to have forgotten this.

Phonics is great – but it is only one building block in the reading foundations.

Fantastic fiction is another building block. Fiction and Phonics are not mutually exclusive. Each needs the other.

THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY TO TEACH CHILDREN TO LEARN TO READ. (Excuse me for shouting!) And anyone who tells you their system is the one and only is either a fraud or trying to sell you a new reading scheme.

The nuts and bolts of literacy must have a context, and story is the best engine to create a desire to learn more and improve reading skills. In fact the act of reading great stories provides a virtuous circle in which the learned grammar is shown to be of beneficial use. When it comes to writing skills, what better way to learn than to read and see how other people do it? Not from sample texts taken out of context, but from a whole story where the reader can see how the writing fits into the whole.

Sometimes I think we are scared of letting children read a whole book – as if it might exhaust them – drain them away. Maybe reading has become a health and safety issue? We don’t want them to use their eyes in case they wear them out and sue us. Perhaps they might enjoy themselves – and what place is their for enjoyment in the serious business of target attainment?

The teaching of literacy has reached the point where I now go into classrooms and find that there are no books on display! Plenty of computers though, which have the best sites – the ones that children want to go to, that might encourage reading – blocked!

The curriculum leaves no time for stories – the one sure-fire system that humanity has devised for the passing on of knowledge.

I’m constantly told that children have a short attention span – it’s not true. Sit them down and tell them a story and they are quite happy for an hour.

Phonics is not the answer on it’s own. The need to read must have a context otherwise it is a boring, useless subject – something you have to do at school. Great books are the reason to want to read – telling stories is the way to sell the need to read.

If we believe it is important for children to learn to read, then we are fools if we rely on one system for all.

New Project

I’ve been over to Whitchurch C of E School this week, to discuss a project we’ll be working on together. They have an unusual year five – there are only four girls in the class! This cohort has moved through the school years.

I met them recently when we did a story planning session. I’m going to work with them on how I can release Dark Claw as a Creative Commons project. I hope that we will produce a body of work that will be of interest and a template to inspire other schools and groups around the world to have a go themselves. I think there is a lot to be explored – a whole alternative universe in fact. It is a writing project, but we’ll be using all sorts of modelling and technology to make it more interesting and relevant.

I’m really looking forward to it. I normally meet groups of 30 to 600 for an hour and talk about me! This time I’ll get to see how individuals and a class work on something over time and will get to know the students too. Planning things with their teacher, Beth Stevens, I realised how much I don’t know about what goes on in the classroom over the week. I’m sure it will all come out in the wash and I’ll learn to pace myself and my expectations. Either way I think it’s going to be fun and VERY interesting!

Bling My Coach

Please vote for the Pink Car Rally coach to win the bling my coach competition by voting for them here
The Pink Car Rally is in aid of a fledgling children’s charity, called the Little Princess Trust, which provides children who have lost their hair (primarily through cancer treatments) with ‘real hair’ wigs. If we win this competition, we can take 49 pink passengers on the coach and if each one raised an average of £50 Sponsorship, we could raise in the region of £2500 for the charity!! How fantastic would that be? It means that the charity could provide wigs for 8 more children!! We NEED to win!! Please help us…..

Please look at the short film, which is introduced by Gail Porter, on the Little Princess Trust’s website (www.littleprincesses.org.uk) It tells the story of how the charity helped Melissa….