• Gladiator-Helmet-British-MuseumI’m getting to grips with my new series called Roman Brit, which will be published by Orchard Books early next year.

    Yesterday I spent the morning in the British Museum, looking for details to add to the stories, and came away with lost of fabulous new ideas.

    I spent some time sketching the gladiator helmet and decided it would be great to make a video showing how to draw it. I imagine there will be lots more videos over the next few months that will be inspired by the illustrations and stories I’ll be working on.

  • ShooRaynerMy eye was caught by a link to a blog entitled Dealing with performance anxiety, with Dr David Roland. It got me thinking.

    Not being an actor, I’ve always say that I “Perform” my stories during the sessions I do in schools and libraries. I always add the ironic quote marks. I’ve had no training or acting experience beyond spear-holding in school plays many years ago. Everything I do in schools and libraries is instinctive.

    But I’ve suddenly realised the whole day at a school or library is a performance. As I ring the bell and the School Secretary buzzes me in to fill in the guest book, I hear a little voice saying, “Enter stage right.”

    Then follows a dizzying day of introduction and performances.

    As the compere – the teacher or librarian introducing me – leaves the “stage” I find myself alone, in the “spotlight”. The stage might be a carpeted area in a classroom, a corner of the children’s library or a school hall with 500 children staring at me.

    When I first sat down to illustrate books in my mum’s garden shed, I never knew this was part of the job. I love being an illustrator. The quiet and solitude is something I chose. And when I started writing, no one ever told me about school and library visits. I like the quiet and loneliness of walking by myself, working out plots and plodding out rhythms.

    My gregarious actor and musician friends will do up to two performances a day. I know what they are like afterwards. They want to talk about it. They’re buzzing. They need to work their way back down from the high.

    I do up to four full-blown one-man shows in a day. I want to talk about it too! I want feedback. I want to know how I’m doing.

    But, at the end of the day, I say goodbye to the School Secretary and “Exit stage left”, on my own, and drive three or four hours home again, or crash out in a Premier Inn somewhere on a roundabout somewhere near the school I’m visiting the next day.

    Am I Complaining?

    Not at all. It’s a privilege to be asked.

    It’s just that I have no idea if I’m any good or if I’m doing what’s expected or what is wanted. There’s no training for the Visiting Author. There’s no job description.

    I suppose it’s some kind of validation to be told you’re better than that bloke they had last time!

    Often there’s something going on in the school. They’ve just been told that they’ve got an ofsted visit next week, or a child has gone missing. I don’t know what’s going on, but the distracted teachers make me I feel like I’m not performing as they expected. On these occasions it can feel like I’m an inconvenience, but I have to battle on. The children sense it too. Those sessions end up very… well… very exhausting.

    Sometimes I fly, soaring on adrenaline and new ideas. Over the years I’ve built up a repertoire of riffs, just like a jazz musician. I play the riffs differently depending on the audience, their age, the group dynamic, what they’ve been studying. Where did I learn to judge the mood of an audience?

    I’ll feel an opportunity coming up moments ahead of where I am in the story. An opportunity to try a movement, a dance, a pause, a moment of timing. I try it and sometimes it doesn’t work, but sometimes it lifts everything. Somehow the kids know I’m going out on a ledge, being dangerous, and a wet, Wednesday afternoon is transformed into something special – a real performance!

    Sometimes I get applause! Hooray!

    Sometimes I get a baffled silence. I don’t know if they are stunned or bored or confused. Then it’s up to me keep the show moving until the bell goes. But I want to say, “Did you see what I did there? Where did that come from? Wasn’t that amazing?” But there’s no one to say it too. So I sit in the staff room and eat my sandwich and listen to the gossip.

    I rarely get to see what other authors do in schools and libraries, so I can’t judge myself against them nor learn from them.

    Am I complaining?

    Not at all, it’s that I’ve just realised how much of a performance, school and library visits are. And so they should be. Once I stop performing and feeling the adrenaline surge as I drive through the school gates, ready to leap onto the “stage”, then I’ll just be going through the motions – reading a script. So I wind myself up for each new day.

    I imagine, it’s much the same for the teachers and librarians, but they own their stage and have a supporting cast to wind down with at the end of the day.

    I imagine it’s the same for every other author visiting schools. Unless they’ve had theatre training and they’ve brought their director along with them too… I gather it happens!

    P.S. I nearly forgot! If you’d like me to come to your school or library to perform, draw entertain or maybe even educate and inspire, pleas don’t hesitate to click the contact link at the top and see if I’m free.

  • this-wayCurrently, there is a lively debate about how children should learn to read. It seems to me that both sides of the debate share the same concern – they all agree that children should become fluent readers, able to both read and understand the written word.

    To me, the debate has come about through the misinterpretation of the word read.

    Those who teach the nuts and bolts of reading are rightly focussed on the decoding of words. This is the ground work of reading. At this stage the word reading is defined as decoding words.

    Later, those children move on to those who teach them to become fluent readers, to gain experience and understanding of the meaning of both words, groups of words and the hidden meanings between the lines.

    Fluency comes with practice. At this stage of building reading skills, the word reading is defined as understanding the meaning of words and the meaning of groups of words, generally referred to as text.

    It seems to me that these two definitions of the same word are the cause of the debate. It’s easy to mistake confusion for criticism. Perceived criticism usually leads to negative thoughts that soon become entrenched ideas and dogma.

    Learning to read is probably the hardest job anyone undertakes in their lives.

    Thank heavens there are dedicated foundation and early years teachers who love their jobs and the children they teach, who lavish time and energy, hearing readers in lunch breaks, tweaking and refining their methods for each individual in their care. They do not get enough praise. So, thank you all.

    And thank heavens for the dedicated remedial teachers who help those for whom the classroom hasn’t worked, who dedicate themselves to saving the ones who slip through the net.

    In any system there will be those for whom the structure, designed for the majority, will to be not suitable. Humans are individuals – one size will never fit all.

    These teachers probably get even less praise, as they do their crucial work in dark corners and cubby-holes around the school. Only they will ever know the effect they have on individual lives. So thank you too.

    Thank heavens also, there are dedicated teachers who want to build on the decoding skills learned by the children who move on up in school. They enthuse children to read on their own, to thrill to stories, to engage with facts and learn to learn for themselves. Thank you also for your hard work and dedication.

    There is a functional use for reading. We need to read road signs, bills, news, instructions, recipes, contracts etc.

    We don’t need to read Shakespeare, Hello Magazine, fairy stories or jokes.

    But we don’t give children books of recipes or instruction leaflets or tomes on contract law, because we know they are deadly boring. They are not going to enthuse children to read.

    That’s why we give children stories that take them away to other worlds, on wild adventures, to make them laugh, cry and scream with fear. Stories connect one mind to another directly. Stories teach empathy, history, bravery, the meaning of love, sacrifice, greed, jealousy, friendship… the meaning of words.

    Stories engage most children. Road signs, on the whole, do not.

    Fluency requires practice.

    A reader will not become a fluent reader without practice. It is the same when learning to play a violin or to kick a goal like Beckham. Practice means reading a lot, every day, just like a violinist practices every day, and the reason why Beckham could always be found practicing after everyone else had gone home.

    The wonder of stories is that when children get bitten by a story, they do not to want to stop reading. They have to know what happens next.

    And while they are finding out, they are practicing their reading skills… and they don’t even know it!

    They are learning about structure. They are seeing that stories really do have a beginning, middle and end. They are seeing the words they’ve learned to decode in context. They are seeing the same words used in different ways, with different meanings, learning empathy, learning that others may interpret the same words in a completely different way. This comes with fluency.

    Reading purely to decode is what machines do.

    My copy of Adobe Acrobat asks me if it would like to decode words it recognises on an image. It does a remarkably good job – better than a ten year old, probably.

    Machines decode for us more and more. Soon they will drive us, so we don’t need road signs anymore. They will sort out contracts and disputes for us. The barcode on the side of the ready meal will program the microwave to deliver a perfect meal every time, so we won’t even see the recipe.

    Academic, legal and technical writing is done by and for academics, lawyers and technicians. We pay them to mediate and elucidate. We don’t need to learn to decode that sort of text.

    So we are left with social media, an environment where you really need to understand the meaning of the millions of stories that flow through the ether, day in and day out.

    What better grounding than to be able to sound out and decoded those weird txt spellings and have all that practice, reading stories about fairies, aliens, talking animals and evil monsters?