2026 is the National Year of Reading. Yay! There’s nothing like reading and getting lost in an adventure. How are you going to celebrate it? By reading of course! And there are lots of ways to do it – and it doesn’t have to cost anything. Borrow books or audiobooks from your school library or […]
We hope you had a lovely school holiday and are looking forward to going back to school. Did you do the Summer Reading Challenge? If you did, congratulations. We hope you also enjoyed some real sports and games. We read lots of books over the summer and travelled the world in our imaginations. Our reading […]
30th June is Dorling Kindersley‘s first ever Dinosaur Day! We’re joining in, encouraging everyone to read about these wonderful prehistoric creatures. Do you have a favourite dinosaur story? Ours are, of course, the Dinosaur Club books. Jane Clarke wrote half of the series, and we wrote the other half. Can you imagine having a […]
We’ve just finished Art Attack which is an online story for Fiction Express. Fiction Express stories are read in classrooms all over the world from Argentina to Thailand. Art Attack is about a boy called Robbie who visits his great-aunt Stella in a care home. Aunt Stella is a sprightly 97-year-old inventor. She has developed […]
It was World Book Day last Thursday and we had an amazing time at a school in Essex. The great thing about writing stories is you can go anywhere in your imagination. On Thursday we went to Africa with Jack and his magic backpack. We had a treasure hunt with Sam Silver Undercover Pirate, faced […]
We’ve had a fun year and hope you have too. It’s been wonderful seeing our readers in the classroom and on Zoom. It’s very cold now and it’s difficult to imagine how hot it was in the summer. On one of the hottest days of the year we went to a school in Chelmsford where […]
Here are seven of our new reading scheme books – written for Collins Big Cat. We enjoyed writing each one of them, but Dreena’s Hair is particularly special for us. We both have someone close who lost their hair through illness – like Dreena in our story. When we wrote this book we found out […]
This year we’ve had a very happy and busy time writing stories for reading schemes – 15 in total. One of these was for Fiction Express which is an incredible online reading scheme and reaches readers worldwide. Our story is called Flying Solo and it’s about the amazing Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly […]
The Spitfire Fund was a very successful crowdfunding project in the Second World War. Picture this. It was Britain, 1940 and the Nazis were threatening to invade. The British had a wonderful plane called the Spitfire but they didn’t have enough of them. Lord Beaverbrook was the Minister of Aircraft Construction. He had the idea […]
We’ve been doing some research into the Second World War. We were surprised to find that not everyone used the shelters at their home or street during the Blitz. Some people ‘trekked’ to nearby fields and spent the night there to avoid the bombing. Then they returned in the morning to go to work or […]