Nilanjana Banerji,  Editor of Children’s Dictionaries for Oxford Education gives us a sneak peek behind the creation of the brand new edition of the Oxford Children’s Colour Dictionary for primary schools, which includes writing tips from top children’s authors for the first time.

Charlie Higson, Andy Stanton, Jeremy Strong, Jacqueline Wilson are all well-known names in the world of children’s fiction today but not normally found in a children’s dictionary. The Oxford Children’s Colour Dictionary has this unique and exciting feature – all of these authors have written for it.

We began updating this dictionary to make it colourful, contemporary, child-friendly, with clear definitions, helpful tips, bright, modern illustrations, and a new supplement on grammar, punctuation, and spelling, for essential language help.

As usual, we consulted the curriculum and used the children’s language research based on the Oxford Children’s Corpus, a database of writing for and by children, to create an authoritative and age-appropriate children’s dictionary. From enchanted to prehistoric, from e-book to parliament, young writers can look up all the words they need for homework help and creative writing.

But how could we help more with creative writing? Why not ask the experts directly? This was a great new idea – for the first time we had successful authors giving us fun tips like Don’t be afraid to copy and Don’t be afraid not to copy! We editors were gratified to hear authors saying Edit your work. And our mission was captured perfectly by the important message Make writing fun.

This vibrant new edition of the Oxford Children’s Colour Dictionary will make literacy fun and give children aged 7+ a head start in reading, writing, and spelling.

The Oxford Children’s Colour Dictionary is out now.