Children’s Poetry

My new book ‘The Castle of Um’ is out and about!

It’s a chapter book for 6 to 9 year olds.

It’s school story with a difference- sections set in the real world are in prose, dream sections are poetry.

“By day, Lily builds a castle out of cardboard.

By night, she builds a castle from dreams.”

Apart from the bits where a magic castle is built by flying clothes, I haven’t made much of this up. It’s all my own experiences at school, and lots of things I’ve seen over all these years working in schools.

I hope it will be first in a series set in ‘Bogwood School’…I have several more written. If this goes well, the others will reach the light of day.

I’ve been running school poetry workshops based on the book this term- all based around the theme of ‘finding your voice’, which is basically what the book’s about. please get in touch if you’d like to know more. 🙂

You can buy the book here:

The White Bird

I couldn’t make the Refugee Buddy Project Poetry Fundraiser last night-
seeing all the posts about it this morning I can see I really missed out. I
donated here instead –

https://www.therefugeebuddyproject.com

do the same!

I thought it was a good moment to share this work made by Afghan refugees from a project I did a few years ago. I worked with a group for a whole school year, who had fled Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. All of the children had frightening first hand accounts of clamouring to get on the plane leaving Kabul – of the crush of the crowds and the pain of leaving loved ones behind.

But mostly they were the most ridiculously fun, joyously naughty and messy group I’d ever worked with.

The poem was by a year 6 child, who was a genuinely extraordinary human being, who I could imagine growing up to be Prime Minister. She wrote the poem almost word-for-word as it is, without edits, after just 6 months or so of learning English. My input was just to help jiggle it around to make it rhyme and to suggest some bits repeated.

The mask was by her little sister, who made this dark, shadowy monstrous mask, hot glued with gravel she found on the playground. She called it ‘Mask of The Taliban’.

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