We are very excited to have started teaming up with some of the authors and illustrators of our ‘texts that teach’ (our BookWrites teaching sequence texts).
Explore the different sections below to hear them talk about their books, what inspires them to write and how they go about the process of writing.
Share these videos with your children to enrich their reading experiences and spark ideas for their own writing.
Visit our shop to purchase the teaching sequences based on books by the authors featured
You can subscribe to our complete collection of BookWrites teaching sequences, for just £180 + VAT per year.
Interview with poet Matt Goodfellow
We first came across Matt Goodfellow through his poetry in Carry Me Away and loved the poems so much that we wrote a teaching sequence for years 3 and 4 based on two of the poems in particular. You can hear Matt read those poems in this interview.
Based in the Manchester area where he was born and grew up, Matt is a former primary school teacher (and aspiring rock star!). His poetry encompasses many areas of our lives – family relationships and friendships, funny events and thoughts, connections with wildlife and the natural world, and the whole span of human emotions. To read more of his work, you might also be interested in his recent collections:
- Chicken on the Roof – pub. Otter-Barry Books (2018)
- Bright Bursts of Colour – pub. Bloomsbury (2020)
To contact Matt about school visits/virtual workshops and to find more videos of him reading his poems and sharing ideas, please visit the Matt Goodfellow website.
All images and poems are reproduced with the kind permission of the author and publisher, Matt Goodfellow.
Interview with author Nicola Davies
Nicola Davies is the author of two of our teaching sequence books: Extreme Animals for years 5 and 6 and A First Book of the Sea for years 1 and 2, as well as one of our most influential Re-think Reading! books, The Promise, for years 5 and 6.
In her early career, Nicola trained as a zoologist and studied bats and whales in the wild, before working for the BBC Natural History Unit and then becoming a children’s author when her own children were in school.
Nicola’s books focus on the natural world and our relationship to it, but she has also written about refugees, disability, grief, children’s rights and bullying.
Her work has won awards around the world including the New York Times ‘picture books of the year’ Award (twice), the Green Earth Book Award and the Subaru SB and F award from the American Association for the Advancement Of Science.
An animated film of her book The Promise is available now on BBC Ideas and was launched in 2020 with a campaign to encourage viewers to make promises for the planet. Her latest book is a novel for older children called The Song That Sings Us.
Nicola now lives in Wales but has strong connections to Devon – we hope to tempt her back for another conference one day!
We apologise for the variability in the quality of sound in parts of this film. Subtitles are available along the info bar of the video.
For more information about Nicola and her work, please follow her on Twitter @nicolakidsbooks.
Interview with author Andy Seed
For my third interview, I am speaking to a hat-obsessed, hilarious creature, joining us from the south-west of England. He is a weird and wacky word-muncher who frequently gets lost on walks in the Forest of Dean – I bring you, Andy Seed!
Those of you who have read Interview with a Tiger and Other Clawed Beasts Too will recognise the style mimicked in the paragraph above.
We are really pleased to have written a years 3 and 4 teaching sequence for this fabulous book and to have interviewed Andy to find out more about his writing.
Andy is the author of over 30 children’s books full of facts, jokes, amazing stories, wildlife, quizzes and poetry. He won the Blue Peter Book Award in 2015 and loves doing school visits where he specialises in getting children excited about reading.
For the last few years, we have been promoting Andy’s The Silly Book of Weird and Wacky Words when talking about vocabulary and in particular, developing a language-rich culture in your classrooms. Many of you will have heard us advocating playing with language and having fun with jokes and word puns such as those in the book.
Watch the interview we had with him here and if you want to find out more about his writing or visits to schools, please get in touch with him via the Andy Seed website.