From Pip to Potter: Celebrating the Place of Children in Care in Literature will take an insightful look at the representation of cared for children in a range of well-loved literature – some of the best loved literary characters are children who are living away from home (Peter Pan, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) and an esteemed panel, including representatives from The Reader Organisation, will gather to discuss these cared-for heroes in the context of a system where children in care can experience stigma.

Poet Lemn Sissay, who has personal experience of the care system, will lead the discussion, and will be joined by Rose Griffiths, founder of The Letterbox Club and poet Caroline Bird who will be representing the work of First Story, which fosters creativity, literacy and talent in hard-to-reach young people.

The Reader Organisation can testify to the significance of reading with looked-after children, and this stimulating event promises to highlight the importance of literature in the lives of cared-for children.

From Pip To Potter: Celebrating the Place of Children in Care in Literature
Sunday 19th February, 5pm, Level 5 Function Room
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

The event is free but requires a ticket and a small booking charge will apply. You can reserve your ticket online on the Southbank Centre website (£1.75 transaction fee) or by phone on 0844 847 9910 (£2.75 transaction fee). You can also book your ticket without transaction fees by visiting one of the Southbank Centre’s ticketing offices in person.

From today until 7th February copies of six stories from former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo’s Mudpuddle Farm series will be handed out  free with Happy Meals. Finger puppets of characters from the series will accompany each book to encourage parents to read with and bring the stories to life with their children.

The promotion is being backed by Harper Collins, who publish the Mudpuddle Farm series, and The National Literacy Trust, whose recent research revealed that one in three children in Britain do not own a book. Director Jonathan Douglas said:

We are very supportive of McDonald’s decision to give families access to popular books, as its size and scale will be a huge leap towards encouraging more families to read together.

Having seen for ourselves how valuable just one book can be to children, and having reached so many with Our Read we think that such a promotion is a fantastic way to extend the reach of reading. Given that eight out of ten families with young children visit McDonalds at least once a year, it’s great to know that they’re contributing to getting more children reading.

In addition to performing both in theatre and on TV as Hamlet, Tennant has performed in literature-based roles as Barty Crouch Junior in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the title character in Casanova and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Romantics.

In an interview with Lucy Fleming, the niece of Ian Fleming who wrote the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, Tennant expressed his surprise at the fact the Child Catcher was created by Roald Dahl for the film and did not feature in the book, but could still appreciate both works.

Inspired by both the book and the film, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s 2011 follow-up to Fleming’s 1964 original sees the Tooting family restore an old camper van and fit it with a magical engine following Dad being given his marching orders at work. You can read the first chapter of the book here.

Of the new book Tennant said:

It’s clever because of the way it absolutely is loyal and very respectful of its source material..Slightly surreal…there’s a kind of macabre element to some of the things that go on in there, there’s some quite dark areas it goes into, and some very, very unexpected twists and turns. [It's] hugely readable. When I was asked to read the audiobook I sat down to read the book and flew through it, it’s just so easy and fascinating and all the things a good book should be.

In November Frank paid a vist to Liverpool Hope University as part of The Reader Organisation’s partnership with the Faculty of Education. Frank spoke to first year Education students about ‘Why Books Matter’ in a brilliant keynote lecture. You can read about his lecture here, and be sure to revisit the website for updates about the progress of the innovative Hope Reader project and other author visits to Liverpool Hope University.

I have just finished reading The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett. Part of my role at The Reader Organisation involves running one-to-one and group reading sessions with children and young people, and so I always have one adult book and one children’s book on the go. I often find that I get a lot of pleasure out of reading books that are written for young people, and some of the children’s books I read I enjoy just as much as adult books – this book was one of those.

There is something magical about The Midnight Zoo from its opening pages – the book begins in a Roma traveller camp somewhere in Eastern Europe and follows the story of two young boys and their baby sister who are trying to survive in the midst of World War Two. What is special and different about this book is that the subject of WW2 becomes almost irrelevant in the story, and it doesn’t matter which conflict the children are in the middle of because this is a story about freedom not about war.

The children are forced to leave their camp, their family and friends behind, and after many days of wandering they stumble upon a zoo which is still standing despite the town around it being destroyed by bombing. The animals, still in their cages, have been forgotten.

What follows made me think deeply about the subject of freedom, what we mean by it, and whether any of us are truly free. The story resonated with me particularly because of the work I do: many of the children that I read with feel that they have had aspects of their freedom taken away from them through no fault of their own; they are in the care system and for many of them their fate is often decided by a court. This feeling of not having control of your own life and not being allowed to make your own decisions can be very hard to bear. I’m not writing this to make any kind of judgement on the care system only to say that I thought of the young people I work with when I read this book and I will read it with some of them and see what they think.

Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo, Walker (2010).

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again tells the story of a family who get more than they bargained for after they soup up their VW camper van with an old racing car engine, and before long are zooming around the world as Chitty comes to life again and is restored to her former glory. So if you’re a fan of Frank’s warmth, wit and deft storytelling ability, then you’re sure to enjoy his latest outing as he steers this much-loved children’s classic on an exciting new course.

Frank’s story about the two Mongolian brothers who arrive in Bootle and enlist a local schoolgirl as their ‘good guide’ to the area has been warmly reviewed by Betsy Bird of the Fuse #8 blog, who suggests that it might be his best novel and describes the book as:

the kind of book you get when an author gets an original idea and works it into something memorable. This is one story kids will read and then find difficult to forget.

Bird also praises the distinctive layout of the book, with its notebook-style page design and inventive use of Polaroid photographs, combined with Frank’s deft storytelling abilities:

Few authors have a way of turning you over on your head in the course of reading a children’s title. Boyce can. Can and does. This is, without a doubt, one of the best little books I’ve ever read. A brilliant melding of text and image, it’s a wonderful example of what can happen when an author goes for something entirely new.

The story has also caught the eye of Meghan Cox Gurdon in the Wall Street Journal, who praised the book’s positive approach to foreign cultures and described it as:

a funny and affecting book for children ages 10 to 14

So if you haven’t read The Unforgotten Coat yet then we can only encourage you to do so, whatever age you are!

Certainly, if sales are anything to go by, then children’s literature is well and truly ruling the roost in the UK book market. Figures from Nielsen BookScan presented at last week’s Bookseller Children’s Conference provided a lot to smile about; in the first half of 2011 up to July the sales of children’s books outperformed all others, overall sales coming out at a staggering £143 million. Pre-school books/picture books and children’s general non-fiction performed particularly well, with both categories upping their sales by 6% from the previous year. It appears that in the time of recession, children’s reading is prioritised by many parents; a particular point of interest being that a select group of older books are the ones being bought in their multitudes.

But it’s not just kids who are ravenously reading the books that are designed for them; just as a dog is for life and not just for Christmas, children’s literature is finding an increasingly comfortable home in the hands – and hearts – of many adult readers. And it would seem that not only are the more grown-up amongst us reading children’s books simply for pleasure but are doing so to revisit the far simpler pleasures of days long past. According to new research, adults are attracted to reading many of the children’s classics as they offer a vivid picture of what has been lost for a lot of people in this frantic modern life – or as, author of the research Dr Louise Joy suggests, because they represent a “symbolic retreat from the disappointment of reality” (as perhaps, all books do in some form…?). It appears such books don’t just provide us with boundless wonder, fantasy and adventure that can be enjoyed at any age but also give us guides for living a happy, humble and fulfilling life, whether it be in the area of self-awareness and self-perception (Alice In Wonderland; several books of Roald Dahl; Wind in The Willows), relationships with others (Winnie The Pooh)…or even just appreciating the goodness of a hearty meal (The Hobbit). More in-depth and insightful information will be revealed by Dr Joy in a forthcoming book, Literature’s Children, and her findings will be presented at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, which will be taking place later this month.

Whatever you’re looking to get out of reading a piece of children’s literature – be it solace, escapism, a reminder of the comfort and cosiness of childhood past or just sheer enjoyment – such news surely comes as solid proof that you’re never too old to read something supposedly just for kids.

In our Poet on Her Work series, Gwyneth Lewis movingly writes about her great long poem A Hospital Odyssey, written while her husband was suffering from cancer.

We have some great new fiction for you to sample with two extracts from Steve Sem-Sandberg’s mortifyingly powerful Emperor of Lies (Faber, July 2011), set in the Łodz ghetto. And David Almond’s ‘The Book of Beasts’ is taken from his first novel for adults, The True Tale of Monster Billy Dean (Viking, September 2011), a test of a child’s innocence. David Constantine’s short story, ‘Strong Enough to Help’ revolves about the way books and poems can connect people up both to each other and to themselves.

Angela Macmillan talks about putting together her new anthology for a younger audience, A Little, Aloud for Children.

We welcome two new essayists whom we hope to hear from regularly: Andrew Crompton writing and drawing on almost anything and everything, and Alan Wall offering an occasional series on the way that words’ meanings or forms change over time, and yet they stick around part of our everyday usage. It’s like the archaeology of the spoken word. And we welcome back and old friend, Kenneth Steven, who writes of the mountains.

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We’re big fans of Roald here at The Reader Organisation and his adult short stories, children’s classics and poems are all used in our groups. In my experience of Get Into Reading, Dahl’s stories have been the best to read aloud with children. The larger than life characters and wonderfully pleasing to say made up words are such a joy to meet, say and hear that everybody involved has wanted to have a turn reading them. For one boy it was a chance to discover all the characters everybody else in his class already knew about and for a lunchtime group I ran in Childwall it was a chance to find out just how funny a book could be; in a week my group swelled from three to twenty attendees who had all heard about an exciting, funny, scary story about witches who had a boss with ‘the funniest voice you’ll ever hear’. The numbers stayed that way for the rest of the year as everybody wanted to take a turn ‘speaking in the high shrrrill woice like they arrrrre the Grand High Vitch!’.

In real life Dahl was a wickedly fun story teller who never switched off; he would make up recipes for his children, marmalade and bacon sandwiches, and tell them it was a secret from the Sheik of whenever his daughters had friends around for sleepovers they would wake in the middle of the night to find Dahl gently rousing them. Still groggy he would lead them downstairs before slinking outside armed only with a torch and slippers. Their destination would be underneath the railway bridge in the village where Dahl would improvise ghost stories in the dark to the deafening rattle of coal and royal mail trains overhead. The children were ten years old and exhilarated.

I think the reason Dahl remains so well regarded is his ability to create a ghastly, seemingly inescapable environment that miraculously gets left behind through a fantastical sequence of events; extreme poverty overcome by a golden ticket, a blood thirsty siege resolved by fast digging and a superhuman (fox?) ability to smell, a bullying teacher beaten by telekinesis and coupled with this, a strong sense that all his stories had to be fun. James and the Giant Peach is another great example of this; from the utterly detestable imprisonment of James by his two aunts, Spiker and Sponge, emerges a transatlantic escape story aboard a flying fruit with giant, talking insects!

A staunch advocate of children reading for pleasure, Dahl insisted that reading was essential for everybody and that without it you couldn’t do anything in life. He would never judge somebody by what they liked to read as long as they read something. His own writing was simply an extension of this desire and so he tried to make it as interesting as possible for children by ‘grabbing them by the throat with the first sentence’ and cramming it full of new people and words at all times. Despite this he was always reluctant to be labelled as a children’s author stating that his work was there for everybody to enjoy:

‘There are many books written just for adults but there are no books written just for children.’

So how will you celebrate today? Why not pick one of your favourites and read it aloud with family or friends or even give an as yet unread one a try? That’s what I’ll be doing with The Minpins and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. If, however, you’re looking at planning something bigger then here’s how our very own Eleanor Stanton did it 5 years ago:

I did a fantastic Roald Dahl Celebration when I was a school librarian in Birmingham. We played music from Willy Wonka, wore an item of clothing back to front, wore something yellow (as this was Roald Dahl’s favourite colour), read extracts from The Twits, Esio Trot and The Witches as well as Revolting Rhymes, Designed our own revolting recipes, had a competition for the best Dahl-esq insult (with prizes) and did a Roald Dahl Quiz. All washed down with Dahl food, such as frobscottle (Schloer to you and me), snozcumbers (cucumbers), A HUGE chocolate cake and wormy spaghetti. It was the best fun I have ever had. Totally recommend it. (The library was an absolute mess afterwards, though – kept finding “spaghetti bookmarks” for weeks afterwards)!

My favourite Roald Dahl story would have to be either Fantastic Mr Fox or The Twits with my favourite ever characters being the three farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, Mr Twit and Augustus Gloop. My favourite to use in groups is Revolting Rhymes, especially ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and my favourite Dahl words to say are ‘Whangdoodles’ and ‘Snozzwhangers’. What are yours?

Even if it hasn’t been the best of summers, it seems like a wasted opportunity not to spend a good chunk of time out and about (just so long as you remember to pack a brolly rather than a parasol, and some extra layers for every eventuality) and as it’s the Bank Holiday, now’s near-on the last chance to do so. Last week’s poem hinted towards the potential downsides of a day out; of peril more serious than a touch of sunburn, sand in sandwiches or an ice cream coming a cropper, and more akin to a vast, threatening black cloud creeping across a gloriously sunny sky. This week, we’ll go for something considerably less sinister without the dark edge, celebrating the close of summer on a positive note and soaking up its remaining goodness like the last drops of an icy cool drink.

A good anthology to delve into whenever, but especially in summertime is A Child’s Garden Of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. You don’t have to be a child yourself to appreciate it – its simplistic but delightful verses are a treat to read to children but also allow the inner child within us all to roam free, summing up the fun and games of children’s summer days; fascinating flights of fancy alongside the more regular routines, with snippets of everyday life made extraordinary due to the fact they are reflected through a child’s eyes. And the title itself seems highly appropriate, not just for the summer when more time is spent being – and reading – out of doors, but as gardens are places of wonder, especially for children, and their versatility couples up extremely well with the variety and pick-and-mix quality of childhood. The same garden can take on many distinct guises depending on the individual child; it could be a fairy paradise, a football stadium, a jungle on the other side of the world, a secret hideaway (in that vein, I always liked the idea of a cross between an English country garden and a topsy-turvy maze; a hybrid of The Secret Garden and Alice In Wonderland)…in short it’s a place of adventure, right at hand and much safer than being out at sea or elsewhere – aside from a few little insect nasties, but that’s nothing a brave adventurer can’t handle…or is it? We’re increasingly being told that children’s sense of adventure is being lost, due to any number of factors – cautious parents, safety standards, other more modern methods of occupying time. It’s got to such an extent that recent reports have identified the existence of lessons for children in how to climb trees and, more worryingly, that the inability to do so is contributing to children becoming physically weaker.

Whether it’s the case that children are becoming less physically adventurous or the media once more making a mountain out of a molehill (I can’t say I’ve seen a shortage of kids scrambling about atop everything in sight), or subsequently just how serious the consequences of not ascending a tree are – making a big deal out of it feels hypocritical to me, a child who was always more comfortable exploring imaginary landscapes than physical ones – it is still lamentable that for whatever reason, adventure may be endangered. That’s why, in the face of concern about the actual world, that children’s imagination should be encouraged even further. Nothing else can send you quite so far and wide, without risking much more than a whirling head from so many different imagined scenes. It’s not that what is imagined should take the place of physical experience; rather, that the best adventures are had when the two go hand-in-hand, as is evidenced in this selection from Stevenson’s child-friendly collection. Plus it’s set at the summit of a cherry tree, which may provide some encouragement to get climbing and clamouring without the need of any lessons in doing so.

Foreign Lands

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky’s blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)