Kickstarting a New Year of Reading
Author Steve Cole launched our new academic year of author events with a high octane introduction to his new novel, The Wild Ones, this morning. The Spinney was buzzing with children from Years 3 to 6 as Steve talked about his own journey as an author, sharing his own attempts at writing as a primary school child and poking fun at himself for the extraordinary events that took place in his blockbuster adventure ‘The Shoe’, which he wrote when he was eight years old. Steve revealed the importance of his trips to WHSmith each month to buy the latest copy of Dr Who stories, contrasting his own handmade versions of Dr Who stories that he had brought to show the children with the series of Dr Who novels he wrote later in life as a professional author. As he told the children, “You may not be aware of what is influencing you at the moment, but it may well come out in your writing later on”.
In a fun-packed hour of activities, Steve played sentence-building games, sang an interactive song about The Wild Ones – complete with animal sound effects supplied by the willing audience – and answered a host of questions. The queue for signing at the end was full of excited chatter and the library is now full of children diving into the world of little terrier Scamp and his friends Chandelier the cat, Punzel the rabbit, Patticake the dachshund, Falstaff the parrot and hamsters Nudge and Wink.
