Encouraging children to act and to read aloud

• As well as being fun, performing is, in my opinion, tremendously good for children’s confidence. I visited lots of schools and libraries, and the visiting children did lots of acting!
  

  Acting Room on the Broom in Hawick library, 2012

• I’ve seen how much play-reading improves children’s reading skills, so I was delighted to collaborate with the publishers Pearson and several fellow authors on a series of sixty fun short plays, called "Plays to Read", which each have parts for six characters and are graded to suit all primary classes.
  
• Again with Pearson, I devised a series of plays with parts for a whole class, each one based on a well-known picture book. The series is called "Plays to Act".
  
• I compiled an anthology of Poems to Perform by a wide range of authors.
  
• I also created a website called picturebookplays.co.uk with lots of ideas to help teachers to dramatise picture books with their classes. This website is currently not on the web as it’s being revised, but should soon be back.

Supporting Libraries

• I wrote lots of articles and spoke with politicians about the damaging effects on children when libraries are closed and librarians’ posts cut. I also wrote a Library Rap for National Libraries Day.
• In September and October 2012 I did a six-week John o’ Groats to Lands End tour. Here I am at the start of that tour.
  I followed that up in 2013 with a Northern Ireland tour. In every library I visited, the children would perform something to me before we acted out one of my own stories. It was such fun! Here are some pictures of the children’s performances.
  

  Children from Bower Primary School in Wick performing Once Upon a Time by Vivian French and John Prater

  

  Children in Scunthorpe Library singing and miming my “Nut Tree” song

  And here is the brilliant cake I was given in Carlisle library. How many of my characters can you spot?

  

Supporting deaf children

I took every opportunity to promote stories both for and about deaf children.

• I was delighted when a company called Deafinitely Theatre dramatized and toured Tyrannosaurus Drip, and when the Seven Stories children's books museum featured many signed stories in their exhibition "A Squash and a Squeeze", based on my books.
• Most enjoyable of all was the workshop I did with the organisation Life and Deaf, helping a group of deaf children create a picture book, What the Jackdaw Saw, which has now been published, with great illustrations by Nick Sharratt. Here is a picture showing some of the deaf children acting out the story at the book launch.

Reading for Pleasure

My three "big things" - performance, libraries and stories for deaf children - are of course all linked to the "biggest thing" of all - the pleasure and richness to be gained from reading. That's something that every Children's Laureate celebrates whenever the occasion arises. Here is a poem (from my Crazy Mayonnaisy Mum anthology) in which I’ve tried to describe that wonderful journey into other worlds and minds that reading takes us on.