What's a Patron of Reading?

A Patron of Reading is an author who links up with a school to help everyone - children and teachers - have even more fun reading! Here's a link to the Patron of Reading website. 

I'm currently Patron of Reading at Coleshill Heath School in Birmingham, and am very much enjoying getting to know the school. I may post some stuff here about what we get up to together!

---

I'm very proud to have been among the UK's very first Patrons of Reading. For three years,  I was Patron at the fabulous West Earlham Junior School, and then at Minchinhampton Primary School in Gloucestershire, where - excitingly - the children and wrote not one but two books together! They're called A Portal Through Time and A Portal Through Place.

The school created a blog about our first book and how we wrote it - and here's a blogpost from the Arts Society, who helped to fund the project.

​BBC Points West broadcast an item about A Portal Through Time, too. Here it is:

When the first book was published, we had a HUGE launch event in Minchinhampton village. It was quite an amazing day. The video below shows photos and video clips from the launch day, and the soundtrack is the song that one of the classes wrote specially for the book. 

We didn't make quite such a big fuss about the second book - nobody had the energy! - but we did launch it at the school's summer fete. It was great to return to the characters from the first book and help the children think of new adventures for them.