Authors Electric

I live in Devon, where I recently observed a family with two teenage daughters visiting one of our beautiful gardens open to the public. The girls were larking about on the lawn, and one of them took their horseplay a bit far, hurting her sister. The mother's immediate response was, "Right, hand it over for half an hour!" and took possession of the offending girl's smartphone.  The teenager grumbled loudly as she surrendered the device (even though she hadn't looked at it once during their boisterous lawn session), whereupon the mother snapped: "Ok, now it's an hour!" Welcome to punishment in the 21st century. In my teenage years, punishment involved staying behind after school for an hour in detention, writing out 100 times: "I must not push my little sister over backwards when she's doing a handstand." while all my friends were down on the beach enjoying the last of the sunshine. But in those days, of course, we didn't have smartp...

I’ve always loved working with small children. From nursery age up through early primary school years, when their world is expanding rapidly and they are working at making sense of it, talking with them is a delight. They vary so much in the conceptual   paths they take along the way. For every child who is sad when the autumn gales destroy Tattybogle , there are several more who ‘love the part where he gets blown all to pieces’! While most children accept that, in The Moon Thieves , the cat, the rat, the boy and his Gran don’t know what the moon is when they first see it, I remember one solemn little boy saying, rather anxiously, ‘But surely the Gran would know?’ We write the stories, the readers make of it what they will. Excellent. I have sometimes asked a class what they would think the moon was if they didn’t know it was the moon. It’s a question Jean Piaget would have said they couldn’t answer, but in any class of 5 and 6-year-olds, there will be one or two wh...

Daisy reading 'Spinderella' by Julia Donaldson and Sebastien Braun recently - she's almost word perfect, I'm told. A few months ago I told you about my little granddaughter’s beginning to tell stories. A few months, of course, is a long time when you’re only two, and in that time Daisy's language use and conversational abilities have progressed enormously. She now seems to have a handle on all the various English tenses (no mean feat, that) and has begun to ask a whole variety of questions, though she is only just getting started on ‘why’ – that’s a pleasure still to come for us all. Still, Daddy teaches physics and Mummy teaches sociology, RE and law, so perhaps between them they will cope (?) We were at the park, Daisy and I, last week. She had been on the swings: ‘Even higher, Nana!’ – and we'd spent fifteen minutes going up and down a ramp. Her next port of call was a climbing net that gave access to a high, enclosed slide, clearly designed for ...