Professional Development Lead Louise Pennington shares her experience of writing maths resources for Oxford University Press
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The examiner reports from OCR have now been published, highlighting some of the features of the best answers from the summer exams of 2019. There were several key characteristics that helped essays to score higher marks; the examiners’ reports should help current students to see where they can improve as they develop their own writing. […]
Read moreWith Halloween coming up, we thought we would treat you to a spooky snippet from the fabulous How to Write Your Best Story Ever! by Christopher Edge, to help you create your own terrifying tales… How to write your best SCARY story! What scares you? A haunted house with creaking stairs? A ghostly apparition flitting through the forest? A vampire rising from […]
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Christopher Edge tells us about the inspiration behind his new book How to Write Your Best Story Ever! A bank-robbing banana being chased by a police pigeon, an accident-prone spy with the nickname Double Oh No!, a crime-fighting baby who googles for clues… These are just a few of the fantastic ideas that children have come up with when I’ve visited […]
Read moreJulia Green, author of Sylvie and Star and Tilly’s Moonlight Fox gives us an insight into the inspiration behind her brand new book for younger readers, Seal Island . I’ve loved islands as long as I can remember: I like the smaller, more intimate scale of an island, the way you can get to know it on foot, the sense of community found […]
Read moreI have always ‘done’ funny. Both as a reader, and a writer. As a child, I snorted through every page of every Dr Seuss, laughed until I cried at Russell Hoban’s inspired creation Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong in her iron hat cooking mutton sog, and the mere mention of the East Pagwell Canal from Professor Branestawm […]
Read moreMy stories are a bit like a fairy with bunions. They are fantasy but they have their feet in the real world. What I really love is making startling, spooky or paranormal things happen in the ‘real’ world that we all know and recognize. When I started out with Dax Jones in the very first […]
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We all know the power of traditional stories such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Gingerbread Man to capture the imaginations of children. This month sees the publication of the first books in our new series of Traditional Tales home learning books, which contain well-loved traditional stories carefully retold using phonics and […]
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Celebrating the publication of The Rachel Riley Diaries: The Life of Riley , Joanna Nadin shares what she wanted to be when she grew up! I never wanted to be a writer when I grew up. That is to say, it didn’t occur to me that writing was a “real” job, much less one that I would be capable of, or derive enjoyment […]
Read moreThe inimitable Geraldine McCaughrean shares her experience of writing The Positively Last Performance , her wonderful new novel about a seaside town and a theatre full of ghosts, each with their own story to tell. First it was Turner, then Tracey Emin. Even the Rough Guide put it among the world’s ten top resorts. Karl Marx and T. S. Eliot […]
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