Before half term arrives and October comes to a close, I’d like to say a big THANK YOU to the children and staff at two primary schools – St. Mary’s in Frensham, Surrey and St. Mary’s in Chiddingfold, Sussex, for making me feel so welcome these last few weeks.
We had great fun making snail trails with the reception and year one classes and everyone enjoyed the little guests we brought along with us. The older children in years two and three enjoyed hearing our story about how we as a family began to write, and they learnt some interesting facts about giant African land snails, including, importantly, that they have mouths with tongues and teeth in them!
Years four, five and six listened very thoughtfully to how we plan our story writing – with story mountains and spider diagrams, reducing the five stages in the story mountain to three simple ones.and how we spent lots of time in libraries looking at different books to work out how many chapters we should have wrriting for the audience that we have. Everyone enjoyed the snails Bob, Gary, Sam and the rest of the little ones that we have yet to name.
The good news during our visit to Chiddingfold is that some of the younger children spotted snail eggs in our tank! We are very excited about these as they are MASSIVE. I’ll let you all know how we get on. My one hope is that they were laid by the GARGANTUAN snail we borrowed from Rosie to take to the Literature Festival in Ilkley a few weeks ago. Now those eggs will be worth watching! 4-6 weeks to go and we will see what comes out of them ….
Next exciting piece of news – Amy is about to finish her pictures for the fourth snail book – Slime in Time. She really is a very talented artist and I can’t wait for you all to see what she has drawn. It’s good of her to fit them in when she is so busy with year eleven, exams looming and big decisions in her life about college = WAH!
Keep on writing, drawing and reading, everyone. But most of all, HAVE FUN being creative wherever you are!
Bye for now.