Have you started the Summer Reading Challenge? Are you ready to explore the story garden? Hopefully you’ll be reading in a garden or park and will see the wildlife for yourself. Get yourselves to a library and chose a book.
We love writing about nature. We’ve written about giant centipedes, animals that trick us and naughty snails eating all the peppers. One of our biggest challenges was researching our Wild Rescue series about endangered animals around the world in places we’ve never been to.
Have a very happy summer full of fun and wonderful books.
One of our favourite series – The Lady Grace Mysteries – is going to be televised on CBBC! We wrote eight of the twelve books and can’t wait to see our hero Grace and her friends, Ellie and Masou in action. Lady Grace is the youngest maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth I but she also has a secret role in the royal court. Her Majesty has many enemies so Lady Grace is charged with keeping her safe – and that’s not easy.
Read the books now and travel back in time to the dangers of Tudor England!
We hope you had a wonderful World Book Day. We did! A big shout out to the schools we celebrated with – The Cathedral School in Southwark, Ewell Castle Prep, The Blake School in Witney, Shears Green Junior School in Gravesend, and Chancellor Park School in Chelmsford. You were all amazing. We were pirates on a treasure hunt, superheroes, and spies at the court of King Henry VIII. We saved endangered animals and explored under the sea with Jack and his magical backpack. And we shared our scroll of stories, of course. It’s a lot longer than when this photo was taken – 231 and more to come.
And now the Easter Holidays are coming. There’ll be lots of time to get out in the sunshine – we hope – and find a secret reading nook!
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 took us to America, Edinburgh and Stonehenge and we were also swept off to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and back in time to 1920. Our favourite read was Into the Sideways World by Ross Welford. It’s a great read for 10 plus.
During the holidays we met someone who’d read our Collins Big Cat story, Dreena’s Hair. They told us about how a group of schoolfriends had all shaved their heads when one of them lost their hair because they were ill. In Dreena’s Hair, Dreena has also lost her hair. Her sister, Scarlet, donates her own hair to a charity that make wigs for children. Imagine Sara’s surprise when she discovered her daughter-in-law does just this every four years and sends the hair to the Little Princess Trust.
Have fun this term and keep 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 dinosaur adventure? This is exactly what Jamie and Tess do when they find a mysterious tunnel in a cave that leads them to a world of living dinosaurs. Which dino would you like to meet? 
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 three interactive paintings which her elderly friends can enter for an amazing adventure. Of course everything goes wrong and Robbie has to rush to the rescue.
Whenever we write for Fiction Express we write a chapter each week. Each chapter has three choices at the end and our readers vote for how they want the story to continue.
Here’s an example of the choices. Which special power does Robbie choose?
A) Super-speed
B) Super-bounce
C) Super-strength
We can’t start the next chapter until we get the result of the vote. It’s very exciting for us as we never know where our story is going to go.
Each week we and our readers contribute to a forum. Readers answer the questions that we pose and their best contributions are rewarded with a certificate. This is celebrated in a Zoom meeting when the book is finished. On Monday we were privileged and delighted to meet some of these readers online. It was a thrill to be talking to students from different countries across the world. They were able to ask us questions about our work and we were able to ask them about their experiences of Fiction Express.
Many congratulations to all the certificate winners!
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 a vicious sea monster and became a spy for Henry VIII. The children’s costumes were fantastic and they worked very hard and shared all their ideas with us.
And if that wasn’t enough, today we had a lovely online visit with a school in Kent. The children were great listeners and asked us some very interesting questions.
We love World Book Day.
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 we recruited Class 3 into WILD Rescue and set off to save a pair of lost snow leopard cubs. Class 3 came up with some amazing gadgets to help us all combat the dangers of the snowy Himalayas.
Here are some more of our snowy books.
Happy Christmas to you all from us and our favourite pirate, Captain Icicle.
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 about The Little Princess Trust. They are a wonderful charity who make wigs for children like Dreena. The wigs are made from real hair donated by others and can really change a child’s life. In Dreena’s Hair her sister and friends come to her rescue. When we’ve been into schools we’ve seen how helpful children are to each other and we wanted to celebrate this.
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 solo across the Atlantic ninety years ago. We imagined what it would be like if someone had gone back in time and met her. Each week we wrote a chapter with three possible choices for how the story could continue and our readers voted for their favourite.
Here’s a challenge for you for the school holidays. Write the first chapter of a story of your own and finish it on a cliff-hanger. Write down three possible things that could happen next and get your friends and family to vote. Then write the next chapter using the winning choice. Watch out as the fun begins! And remember, your story might go in an unexpected direction.
Here’s an example from Flying Solo. Amelia has gone up on a test flight and taken our hero, Grace with her. This is what happens next.
We were already high above the nearby fields. Amelia was enjoying herself, whistling as she made the plane circle over the trees below.
Then she stopped whistling. “Something’s wrong,” she cried.
What happens to the plane?
It runs out of fuel
It starts to dive
Flames can be seen coming from the engine
So get writing and most of all, have fun.