Medieval life

I spend a lot of time thinking up new stories to write. Normally I write very short ones (for picture books) but occasionally I get carried away and write pages and pages! That is exactly what happened recently when I set about writing a story about a little boy called Simon who lives in a Medieval village.

Don’t ask me why I decided this boy lived in Medieval times. Sometimes a character just tells you who he is and you have to go along with it! Perhaps I was inspired by a painting like the one above, painted by Pieter Bruegel in 1568. It shows a group of villagers at a dance, and it’s one of the best ways to learn about the way people lived in an earlier time.

To write properly about Simon, I first had to do some research into how people lived in Medieval times (also known as the Middle Ages). When you write about a certain time in history, it’s important to get your facts right!

Life was very different back then, about 700 years ago. It was long before televisions, computers and central heating were invented. There was no running water, so you had to go and fill a bucket every day at the village well or a nearby stream. They didn’t have soap or toothpaste or shampoo, and nobody understood that dirt could carry germs and make people sick.

It was a pretty hard time to be a poor peasant boy. Simon would have lived in a simple wooden house coated in mud with a thatched roof. Because this was a time before chimneys, the fire they used to cook and keep warm would have made the house very smoky. Here is a good website with more information about Medieval houses in Britain and what it was like to live in them.

Rich people in the Middle Ages wore velvet clothes, fancy hats, colourful tights and pointy shoes. But the peasants had much simpler clothes, and this is what Simon and the other villagers would have looked like:

The man in this picture has big holes in the knees of his leggings. He has put the handle of his basket on his head to make it easier to carry (and keep his hands free). I’m not sure what that long stick is he’s holding – it looks like he’s going to play a game of lacrosse! I wonder what will happen to that goose when they get home… Will they eat it?

In my story Simon works very hard, feeding the pigs, fetching water, mending the fence and trying to keep his bad-tempered mother happy (an impossible task!) I needed to create other characters for the village, so I looked up the sort of names people had in Medieval times, and came up with Agnes (Simon’s mother), Gilbert the miller, Edmund the farmer, William the blacksmith and Martha the innkeeper. I had fun choosing names for all the wives, too: Bertha, Hilda, and Norma the nosy neighbour!

If you’d like to see what it would really be like to live in a Medieval village, there are some in the UK and further afield that you can visit.

Cosmeston Village is near Cardiff, in Wales.

Hangleton Cottage is near Hove in East Sussex.

Duncarron is a reconstructed Medieval fortified village that is still being built in the Carron Valley in central Scotland.

Camlann Medieval Village is in Washington State, USA.

This History on the Net website has a great checklist for choosing the perfect place to set up a Medieval town or village. It has to be near water, have a good supply of wood for fires, and also have a clear view all around so you can see your enemies coming!

I had a great time writing the story of Simon and his Magic Fish. Maybe one day it will be published and you can read it!

Reasons to celebrate!

Friday April 20th is a special day for me. It is the first birthday of my Blog for Kids! I have had a lot of fun writing about things I care about over the past year, and it’s been great to get responses from you, too! The little cat above is a drawing Anna did for her 10th birthday party, so I thought it was a good way to start this post.

To celebrate my blog’s birthday I have decided to write some GOOD NEWS stories. For example, I always get a special thrill each spring when the giant cherry tree outside my house comes out in beautiful pink blossom. This is the view from my window at the moment, and it never fails to cheer me up, even on a rainy day!

Speaking of pink things, I have amazing news that on April 11th, over 8 MILLION people around the world dressed in pink to show that they were standing up against bullying. Isn’t that fantastic? If you want to see some of those people in action, check out the City News Day of Pink video HERE. It’s great to see so many young people working together for a good cause and having fun at the same time. In one highschool in Toronto they even made special pink food in the cafeteria!

Here is another wonderful reason to celebrate. His name is Alfie and he is a rescue dog recently adopted by a friend of mine. Isn’t he gorgeous? He has only just arrived in his new home, so I hope he settles in well and becomes a special member of the family. I love dogs so I hope one day I’ll get to meet him!

The month of April marks another first birthday – that of the Guardian Children’s Books Website. This is a brilliant site full of book reviews, video interviews with authors, quizzes, the latest children’s book news and even drawing tips! You can sign up and join in the action, writing book reviews yourself and getting involved in discussions. To find out more about the site and how to join, click HERE.

In some parts of the world, people live in such isolated and hard-to-reach places that they can’t enjoy the simple things we take for granted – like books. I recently discovered (from @shedworking on Twitter) that in Venezuela there is a clever new way to bring books to children in remote mountain villages. Book mules!

These animals are very tough and can be used to carry heavy loads along treacherous mountain paths where a four-wheeled vehicle couldn’t go. When the book mule arrives in a village, the children all cry “Bibliomulas!” and race to find something to read. In a place where there are no libraries or bookshops, you can imagine how exciting it would be to see the mule coming!

In some of these places there is starting to be some mobile phone reception, so the mules can carry laptops to give the villagers access to the internet. Cyber mules! This story was reported on a BBC Radio 4 programme called From Our Own Correspondent, and you can read a big article about it HERE. I think it’s brilliant!

Day of Pink

A few years ago, a teenage boy went to school wearing a pink T-shirt, and he got teased and bullied for it. Two other boys in the school decided they wanted to send a message to those bullies, so they got lots of pink shirts and talked to their friends about their plan. A few days later, the whole school was a SEA OF PINK, with lots of kids wearing pink shirts. The bullies got the message loud and clear!

Since then, the second Wednesday in April every year is the Day of Pink, when kids and grown-ups all over North America wear pink to show that they are standing up against bullying. It’s not too late for you to get involved!

Here is a brilliant YouTube video showing lots of kids from schools in Canada and the US dancing in their pink “Acceptance” T-shirts. They have chosen Lady Gaga’s song Born This Way which is perfect for celebrating diversity: VIEW VIDEO HERE.

A young man called Jeremy Dias founded the Day of Pink in Canada and his organisation continues to fight against bullying and discrimination all year round. Check out their website HERE to find out more about what they do. If you happen to be in Ottawa, Canada, you can go to their Day of Pink Gala at 6:30pm on 11 April, 2012.

This amazing pink movement was happening at the same time that my book Pink! was published. It was a total coincidence, but my book is all about a penguin being bullied because he is different! The message in Pink! is the same: everyone is different and we all deserve respect.

When Pink! was published in Canada, I got a message from a lady in Vancouver who used my book in her daughter’s classroom to talk to the children about being different. She said it was a great tool for getting kids to think about how they treated each other, and it really helped her daughter feel more accepted in the class. That gave me an idea…

Pink! is just one of many books for kids that help explore issues of diversity and acceptance. Check out the website Healthy Books for books about bullying, disability and self-esteem/being different. On this Day of Pink, maybe you can look at some of these in your school and get talking about how they share the same anti-bullying message. And see what you’ve got in your closet at home that’s pink. It’s time for a PINK CELEBRATION!

Paint a self-portrait

If you’re an artist and you like to draw people, the best way to practise your technique is to do a portrait of yourself! Lots of famous artists have done self-portraits, and you can see how their skills improved as they got older and more experienced.

Albrecht Durer was a German artist who lived from 1471 to 1528. His first self-portrait was a silverpoint drawing he did when he was only thirteen years old! (Silverpoint, a sharp metal instrument scraped across a painted white surface, was used before pencils were invented.)

As Durer got older he started using oil paints. In the painting above he is twenty-two years old and  has painted himself holding a thistle. This painting may have been intended for his fiancée Agnes Frey (though a thistle is a rather prickly flower to give your girlfriend!)

This third self-portrait shows how Durer is getting older and more skilful in his technique (here he is twenty-six). He has grown a beard and his long, golden hair is very curly. You can see that he favours this pose and always paints his face with a serious expression. In the days before photographs, to paint a self-portrait the artist had to use a mirror as he or she worked. I do hope Durer didn’t get any paint on that fancy black-and-white outfit!

As you can see, Albrecht Durer was very talented from an early age. He became a successful painter of commissioned portraits, altarpieces and religious paintings, but he also loved to do nature studies such as this famous watercolour of a hare:

That painting he would have been able to do from life, just like Beatrix Potter did with her pet rabbits many years later. But he didn’t always draw animals he could see. One of his most famous woodcuts is one of an Indian rhinoceros that was given as a gift to the King of Portugal in 1515. In those days a rhinoceros was a very exotic and strange animal that no one in Europe had ever seen!

Durer never saw the animal himself, but did this picture from a written description and a little sketch someone else gave him. For this reason, it looks as if it is wearing a suit of armour! If you want to know more about Durer’s rhinoceros, click HERE.

Another artist whose many self-portraits help us to see how his painting style changed over the years is Pablo Picasso. When he was very young he painted in a realistic way.

This self-portrait he did at the age of fifteen shows how talented he was. Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, and he studied art in Paris and became the most famous artist in the world! Part of the reason he was so celebrated was because he invented entirely new ways of painting that were shocking and surprising.

This next self-portrait was done when Picasso was twenty-six, and you can see how his style has changed. Instead of painting a realistic picture, he has made it very stylised with bold, angular lines and simple outlines of the eyes, nose and ear. His later work was even more abstract, with parts of a face put together in a striking and sometimes disturbing arrangement.

This portrait of a woman was done in 1960 when Picasso was seventy-nine years old. You can see two views of the woman at the same time: one from the side and one face-on. The blue and green colours and the woman’s expression give the painting a feeling of great sadness.

Anyone can do a self-portrait. When my daughter was five, her whole class did paintings of themselves to put up on the classroom wall. This is what hers looked like:

When you see what she looked like at five, you can see the resemblance!

It’s fun to paint a picture of yourself, and you can try all different styles and materials. Make it bold and colourful with oil pastels, or subtly shaded in pencil or coloured pencil. Make it crazy and abstract like a Picasso portrait, or as realistic as a photograph. How do YOU see yourself?

My friend Marg asked if I had any self-portraits I could show you. I love drawing and painting people, but I haven’t done a picture of myself for years! What I can show you are a few portraits I have done of other people over the years.

This picture of Anne Frank was done from a well known photograph when I was in Art College. I used gouache paint which is very tricky to work with. I got a B for this effort!

This portrait of a sad looking little boy I did a few years later when I was working as a children’s book illustrator. It is done in watercolours, my favourite medium for many years.

The last one I have to show you is done in pencil and coloured pencil. My husband was in India and he took this picture of a girl carrying a bowl on her head. I thought she was very sweet looking! We now have this drawing framed in our kitchen. I hope all this art will help to inspire your own creative ideas. Time to get drawing!

New York City

As April approaches I am reminded of how excited my family and I were last year at this time as we planned our first trip to New York City! Despite growing up only a few hundred miles away in Canada, I had never actually been there. Over the years I had heard so much about this famous city that I just had to visit!

We stayed for a week in a simple little hostel on 103rd Street, just a block from Central Park. On our first day we got ourselves weekly passes for the subway and bus system, so we could explore the city easily. Of course we had a list of must-see tourist attractions, like Times Square (above), the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum and Brooklyn Bridge.

Although I’m not very keen on going to the top of very tall buildings, it would have been crazy to visit New York and not go up the Empire State Building. We had to wait for a clear day, as it is so tall it sometimes gets enveloped in clouds!

Inside, the building is very beautiful, with 1930s Art Deco design in marble and brass. It was begun in 1930 and took just over a year to build, with up to 3,000 men working on it at one time. Getting to the top takes quite a while, but it’s worth it for the amazing view of the city you get from the top. In this picture we are looking north-east, and you can just see the point of the Chrysler Building, another beautiful Art Deco masterpiece.

To see another well known landmark, the Statue of Liberty, we decided to take the Staten Island Ferry which sails right past it. The ferry was free, so we got a great view as we went by. You can see by the size of the people down below just how big the statue is!

One of the things my children were very keen to try was a New York hotdog! There are lots of hotdog stands all over Manhattan, so it wasn’t hard to grant their wish. Once they tasted the first one, they wanted hotdogs every day for lunch!

We did lots and lots of walking around the city, crossing Central Park most days to catch a bus down Fifth Avenue. It’s amazing how enormous the buildings are all around you, with so many people bustling about. It was all very exciting!

One day we decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which goes from the City Hall area over to Brooklyn (south-east of Manhattan). It’s a huge suspension bridge built in Victorian times (1883 to be precise). If you want to see a video of what it’s like to cross this bridge, click HERE. From Brooklyn Bridge you can see some great views of the city.

We were very lucky in the timing of our visit, as some great things happened while we were in New York. First, we discovered that an opera called The Elixir of Love was on at the Lincoln Centre, and that tickets were only $12! This was an opera that we all knew quite well because my son had been in a production of it when he was younger (playing a village boy). We don’t go to a lot of operas but this one we knew and could hum along to so we had to buy tickets! It was a fantastic show, and the set was done in 1950s style with a real car that rolled on in the second act!

The other amazingly lucky thing that happened was in the middle of our trip, on a Wednesday. We were walking along Fifth Avenue, heading towards the Apple Store which is a giant glass cube. As we came to 47th Street we found there was a barricade blocking traffic and pedestrians, with police standing around. A crowd had gathered, and when I asked a policeman what was happening, he said simply, “The President.” As we stood there, a whole fleet of black security vehicles and several motorcycles zoomed past. Sure enough, a few minutes later two huge black limousines rolled by with little flags on them. In the back of the second one, I saw President Obama waving!

My son was so busy trying to take a picture of the first big limousine that he missed seeing the President in the second one. He was so upset! We weren’t sure how to console him, so we carried on walking to the Apple Store and looked at computers and iPhones for about an hour. He was still miserable as we headed back up Fifth Avenue, but when we got to 47th Street the road was still blocked. You can imagine our delight when the policeman I asked said, “The President” again! He was coming back!

This time we were ready, and when the second limousine went by we lifted my son up as high as we could over the crowds of people. (As he was eleven at the time, this was quite a feat!) But it was worth it to let him share in our amazing experience. We saw President Obama! (We found out later that he was in New York to attend an important meeting at the United Nations Headquarters.)

On our last day in New York it was sunny and hot, and we hired bikes to ride all the way around Central Park. What a fantastic way to end our amazing holiday!

If you want to see more pictures of New York, here’s a YouTube video of one of my favourite Rufus Wainwright songs, called 14th Street.

Spring!

If you live in the northern half of the globe, March 20th is officially the first day of spring. After a long, cold winter, the return of blue skies and warmer temperatures is a cause for great celebration! It’s the time for snow to melt away, for migrating birds to fly home again, and for hibernating animals who have been sleeping all winter to wake up. Tiny white snowdrops and golden daffodils start to appear, and soon the trees are covered in blossom! Spring is definitely my favourite time of the year.

Many artists through the ages have tried to capture the delight and beauty of spring. During the Renaissance in Italy, the painter Sandro Botticelli created a giant work of art called Primavera (“spring” in Italian). In it he shows the goddess of spring in an orange grove surrounded by nymphs. Above her you can see a little winged boy with a bow and arrow. He is not just any naughty child – he is Cupid, and anyone who is hit by his little arrow will fall in love.

About 100 years later, another Italian artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, created strange portraits of people whose heads seemed to be made of vegetables or flowers! His version of Primavera is a woman with roses for ears, a leafy green dress and all sorts of wild flowers for hair.

In the 1890s a Czech artist called Alfons Mucha became very successful in Paris painting beautiful women in flowing gowns for theatrical posters, book illustrations and advertisements in magazines and newspapers. His style was very distinctive and it soon became known as Art Nouveau (“new art”). Mucha’s version of spring (Le Printemps) is typical of his most famous work.

This curvy, elongated style was adopted by other artists across Europe, including the famous Glasgow couple Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. They designed beautiful interiors using similar elongated female forms in their decorative panels. A good example of this is Margaret Macdonald’s piece, The May Queen, which also has a spring theme!

But it was not only artists whose work was inspired by the coming of spring. Antonio Vivaldi, an Italian composer who lived over 300 years ago, wrote a beautiful piece of music (now very famous) called The Four Seasons. In the section called Spring he recreated the sound of wild thunderstorms and gently melting snow. If you want to listen to Vivaldi’s amazing musical Spring, click HERE.

Perhaps as you listen you will be inspired to create your own spring work of art!

Australia

When my children were still very young, our whole family went for a big adventure in Australia! We left behind a cold, grey February in the UK and arrived in Sydney where it was – raining! But not for long. February is summertime in Australia, so we soon found it was sunny and hot almost every day.

We were staying for a few months, so we had lots of time to see everything and visit as many cities as we could. Australia is a very big country, so we didn’t manage to do it all. We were lucky to be staying in Sydney, which is full of famous landmarks like the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The Sydney Opera House has become a symbol of Australia because it was completely unique and surprising when it was completed in 1973. Now there are lots of buildings that imitate its design, but nothing really compares to the original! The architect, Jorn Utzon from Denmark, intended the Opera House to look like a ship with billowing sails on the water. The roof structure also looks quite like seashells piled together.

It isn’t just for opera, either – you can also see theatre, concerts and shows for kids. Here’s a link to what’s on for kids at the moment, just in case you happen to live in Australia or are planning a visit!

Across the harbour from the Opera House is Taronga Zoo, which stretches up a big hill. Not only are there lots of interesting animals to see, including all the special ones like kangaroos and koalas that you only find in Australia, but from the top of the hill you get a fantastic view of Sydney as well!

We loved exploring all the beaches around Sydney, including Manly, Balmoral, Bronte, Bondi and Clovelly Beaches. This picture is of Clovelly Beach where we used to go quite often. My husband liked to snorkel there because it had enormous fish called “grouper” that didn’t mind a person swimming around amongst them. I must admit I never tried this! The very idea of swimming with giant fish as big as me was terrifying! But I am a deep sea wimp, that’s for sure.

We also visited Melbourne, and were very impressed by the Royal Botanic Gardens. It was like a lush, green paradise where all the trees were enormous and very exotic! You can see in the picture below how beautiful it is. Melbourne was a surprise for us, though. We set off in a car and drove for four hours, and when we arrived we couldn’t believe how much colder it was! Coming from the warmth of Sydney it was quite a shock, and we were not prepared. We had to rush to a shop and buy socks, jumpers and coats as we hadn’t brought any warm clothes with us!

We also visited the Blue Mountains which are about two hours inland from Sydney. Because Sydney is on the coast and the mountains are higher up, the air is cooler there and you get amazing rainstorms and sometimes even rainbows. We were lucky when we got to the Three Sisters, a striking set of bare rocks rising out of the forest-covered hills. Just as we got the camera out, a rainbow appeared!

Australia is so big that to get to some places you really have to fly. We were very excited to get on a famous Quantas airplane with its kangaroo design on the tail. Here you can see me with the children getting on a plane for the very centre of Australia where the earth is red and it’s dry desert for hundreds of miles…

The place we were going is called the “Outback” and it is where you can find an amazing red mountain rising out of the flat landscape. The name given to this rock by the Aboriginal people of Australia is Uluru. Near it you can also find smaller red rock mountains grouped together which are called Kata Tjuta. This means “many heads” and you can see from the picture below why the Aborigines gave them that name. These mountains have been formed by millions of years of wind and rain wearing them down. They are much harder rock than the surrounding land, so they have emerged as the softer material around them is worn away.

We had heard about Uluru and knew it was considered to be a sacred place by the Aborigines. These are people who have lived in Australia for thousands of years, far longer than anyone else. They are experts in survival in this very harsh desert environment. To see Uluru at its best, you must wait until late in the day when it is lit up by the setting sun.

Australia is a fantastic place to visit! We hope to go back again some day, as there’s still lots we haven’t managed to see.

A very special day

The 29th of February is a special day, since it only comes round once every four years. If it happens to be your birthday, you never get very old, and it makes you a little bit special too! My Aunt Ruth and her twin brother were born on February 29th, so although they are both grandparents now, they have only just turned eighteen!

The reason why we have one extra day every four years is very interesting. As you know, every day is divided up into 24 hours. That is how long it takes the earth to spin around once on its axis. (It’s funny how it can be spinning at quite a speed and yet we don’t feel a thing!) But that is not all it’s doing…

At the same time, the earth is travelling in a big circle (called its orbit) around the sun. To get all the way around takes exactly 365 and 1/4 days. We call that a year. But because you can’t have a quarter of a day at the end of each year, we have to save those quarters up until they make a whole day (every fourth year). Because poor little February only gets 28 days most years, it seems only right that it should get the extra day!

As you may have noticed, if your birthday falls on a Saturday one year, it will be on a Sunday the next, moving forward by a day each year. But every fourth year when that extra day is added, your birthday will leap over a day and be on the next day instead.

That is why this special year with the extra day is called a Leap Year. The 29th of February is Leap Year Day, and people born on that day are called “leaplings.” It must be especially exciting for them when their birthday comes around after such a long wait!

But even if it’s not your birthday, this extra day in February is something we can all enjoy. It’s like a little bonus day you get for nothing. I think it calls for a treat of some sort! Perhaps you can enjoy a delicious Leap Cake?

Maybe the best thing to do on February 29th is to visit an ice cream parlour for a Leap Cone! What flavour would you choose?

Some people are keen to see Leap Year Day become a public holiday. They want to celebrate the beauty of nature and the universe, and draw our attention to the amazing scientific discoveries that have helped us understand how the world works.

I must admit I find it pretty incredible that scientists like Copernicus and Galileo used only telescopes and mathematical calculations to work out how our earth and the other planets orbit around the sun.

Whatever you decide to do with your extra Leap Year Day, I hope you enjoy it!

All about puffins

When I was doing research for my Puffin Pack, I found out all sorts of surprising things about puffins. For example, they are sometimes known as “Clowns of the Sea,” something I hadn’t realised when I wrote Lewis Clowns Around. As it turns out, Lewis the puffin had the right idea when he decided to join the circus!

I was also amazed to learn that there is an island off the southwest coast of England (12 miles from the coast of Devon in the Bristol Channel, to be exact) where puffins have an important history. The island is called Lundy, and this name probably comes from the old Norse word “lundi” which means puffin. Although it is small with high cliffs and rough weather, there have been people living on the island for hundreds of years. These have included Vikings, medieval monks, knights, pirates and convicts!

In the 1920s a man named Martin Coles Harman bought the island and declared himself king of Lundy. He decided to make his own coins and stamps, and instead of pennies he called them puffins. Here is a picture of a two-puffin stamp:

Martin Coles Harman decided he should have his face on the one puffin coin as well, since he was the king! He looks pretty serious, doesn’t he?

Making his own coins got Martin Coles Harman into some trouble, and he was fined £5 by the House of Lords in 1931. He had to pay up and stop making the coins, but the stamps are still printed today!

Lundy must have once had lots of puffins living on its cliffs, but now there are hardly any. This may be because people have been fishing all the sand eels, leaving very little for the puffins to eat. It may also be because baby puffins and eggs were easy prey for brown rats that used to be common on the island.

Today Lundy Island is looked after by the Landmark Trust, and fewer than 30 people actually live there. It is possible to visit the island and stay in holiday cottages there, and the Landmark Trust is working to conserve the wildlife and natural habitat of Lundy.

But Lundy isn’t the only island that has puffins on its stamps. This one comes from the Faroe Islands, which lie in the North Atlantic Ocean, half-way between Norway and Iceland and directly north of Scotland. This is definitely puffin territory, and in fact the Faroese (people of the Faroe Islands) like to eat them!

I think puffins are far too cute to eat, and since they’re only the size of a pigeon they wouldn’t make much of a meal. Luckily for them, puffins live in burrows dug into very steep cliffs, and they spend lots of time out on the open ocean, so it’s quite hard to catch them. Their biggest enemy is the Great Black-Backed Gull, which can swoop down and catch a puffin in mid-air!

Puffins mate for life, and build a nice soft nest in their cliff-top burrow using grass, seaweed and feathers. When mum lays an egg, both parents help look after it until it hatches, and then they bring the chick little fish to eat. It takes about 45 days for the chick to grow strong enough to fly off and find fish for itself.

Photo by David Tipling Getty

Puffins eat herring, sprat and sand eels, and you can sometimes see them with a huge mouthful of fish all jammed in together. They hold them in with special ridges inside their beaks. I think the record is sixty little fish in one puffin’s mouth!

In Iceland puffins are becoming more scarce because of a shortage of sand eels (also called sand lances). The National Geographic have made a short video about the problem on YouTube which you can watch here.

A while back I went to the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick, where I read my story Lewis Clowns Around. The centre has lots of information about seabirds living on Scotland’s coasts, and puffins are really popular! (I especially like the shop where you can find puffin toys, calendars, postcards, keyrings… even my book!)

If you’re crazy about all things puffin, you can check out the only online shop devoted entirely to these cute little birds. Naturally enough, it’s called the Puffin Shop.

Introducing the Puffin Pack!

I have developed book bags for three of my picture books, which include lots of fun activities for kids like quizzes, word searches and unusual projects (Build Your Own Snail Hotel, for example). Now that I have a new book, Lewis Clowns Around, I decided it was high time I put together some fun stuff for Lewis too!

Lewis Clowns Around is a story about a misfit puffin who longs to be something else. He hates fish and is frightened of heights, so he decides to follow his dreams and become a circus clown. He works really hard, learning how to juggle and do flips and cartwheels, and then he gets his very own clown costume: stripy socks, enormous shoes, a pointy green hat and some red pompons down his front. His first performance is a big success, until the final trick when something goes wrong and he has to find the courage to save the day. In the end, Lewis the clown is a big hero!

I have decided to put all the Lewis goodies into a sturdy, A4 plastic box that can stand on a shelf. I call it the Puffin Pack. The first thing you find inside the box is a signed copy of Lewis Clowns Around. Next there’s a letter from Lewis in a shiny blue envelope. (If you look closely, you can see Lewis on the stamp, too!) Lewis is travelling with the circus, so he has borrowed some circus writing paper from the Ringmaster, Phineas Fox. As you can see here, the Puffin Pack also includes some Lewis bookmarks and a Picture Kelpies postcard.

The Puffin Pack has lots of information about seabirds and their habitat, including a detailed list of Fabulous Puffin Facts and four illustrated fact sheets for colouring. There is also a Quiz based on the book, and some great Activities for kids to do at home or in the classroom. The colouring sheets and activity pages are designed to be copied for everyone in the class. Draw your own Crazy Circus Characters, find all the words in the Seabird Word Search, write a letter back to Lewis, design a circus poster and learn some circus tricks in the playground!

Last but not least is an A4 size poster of Lewis you can put up on the wall. And all this costs only £20 plus postage!

This is the poster of Lewis the clown.

The Puffin Pack is ideal for primary teachers and after school clubs. For more information or to order your Puffin Pack, contact me here.