New Children's Laureate announced

Julia Donaldson was born in 1948. She grew up in London and studied Drama and French at Bristol University. She worked for a few years in publishing and as a teacher, while also writing and performing songs and street theatre with her husband Malcolm, and writing and directing two musicals for children. She then combined a career writing songs for children’s television with bringing up a family. In 1993, one of her songs was made into a book, A Squash and a Squeeze. Since then she has written over a hundred books and plays for children and teenagers, including the award-winning rhyming stories The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom, The Snail and the Whale and Zog, all illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which are among the UK’s best-selling picture books.

Julia has also worked with different illustrators, among them Lydia Monks, Nick Sharratt and David Roberts, and has written several young fiction titles, including three books about Princess Mirror-Belle, who is the badly-behaved reflection of a well-behaved girl. Her novel for teenagers, Running on the Cracks, came out in 2009 and won the Nasen Inclusive Children’s Book Award.

She is also the author of many educational books, including the 60 books which comprise the phonic reading scheme Songbirds. This series is part of the Oxford Reading Tree published by Oxford University Press.

Julia still loves writing and singing songs, and has produced three books of these, each one with a CD on which she is accompanied by some great live musicians. And her passion for drama is kept fresh by her frequent dramatic performances at book festivals and theatrical events, where she talks, acts and sings with her audiences.

Farmer Duck - Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury

Farmer Duck - Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury (1996)

There once was a duck

who had the bad luck to live with a lazy farmer. While the duck worked, the farmer lay in bed - until one day the other animals decided to take action! Martin Waddell and Helen

Oxenbury work their storytelling magic in Farmer Duck. A duck does all the work for a lazy farmer until a rebellion by the other barnyard animals sets

them all free. It has been said, that by book's end, young

readers will flap for joy right along with the endearing web-footed hero.

I love this book because of it's fun nature. All children will be on the side of the animals getting rid of the farmer. It's interesting that

we're never told the animals' plans to get rid of the farmer, and yet we don't need to the finer

details of the plans, the story is unfolded in the illustrations. I love that this book as has sweet and delicate interdependence of words and text. It brilliantly

showcases these two masters of children's literature: Helen Oxenbury and Martin Waddell.

Firstly, Helen Oxenbury is in my top 5 favourite illustrators.

The simplistic look of her illustrations, are actually belied by the complexity in which they are drawn. Helen Gillian Oxenbury is an award-winning illustrator of children's picture books. She lives with her husband, the illustrator John Burningham, in north London. (We'll come back to the outstanding John Burningham in a few weeks time.) I love the way she draws faces with such simplicity, and yet, they easily convey to a child how the character is feeling.

Martin Waddell is widely regarded as one of the finest contemporary writers of books for young people and he won the prestigious Hand Christian Anderson Award in 2004. He is also a twice winner of the Smarties Book Prize - for "Farmer Duck" and "Can't You Sleep, Little Bear?" - and he also won the Kurt Maschler Award for "The Park in the Dark" and the Best Books for Babies Award for "Rosie's Babies". Martin Waddell (born 1941 is a prolific, award winning children's author. He has lived most of his life in Newcastle. As a child, Waddell was often told stories in a lively manner. This inspired him and "the love of story" stuck with Waddell ever since. In 1972 he went into a church to stop some vandals and got caught up in an explosion in Donaghadee, Co Down - an experience that took him some years to ovecome. As an author, nearly all of Waddell's stories are inspired by events and/or places in his life at the foot of the Mourne Mountains. As he humorously claimed, "I’ve been blown up, buried alive and had cancer as an adult, and survived all these experiences, so I’m a very lucky man."

Farmer Duck is well worth a borrow from the local library to read to your children aloud.

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit.

Peter Rabbit by Beatrix potter, 1902

I had bought some CDs of the Peter Rabbit tales being red aloud and my child liked them

so much, I went and bought a couple of the books. A family favourite is The Tale of Tom Kitten and I like The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I love the simplicity of these stories. The little tidbits that draw the

pictures with the language as you go through. For instance, we're told Peter's father is caught by Mr McGregor and put in a pie by Mrs McGregor ... no need to say he was killed, but

we're told of his fate. Interestingly, my child learnt the stories without the pictures to go with them, just the CD. Potter was exquisite with both l

anguage and illustrations.

Potter was an interesting woman, I think. Here's some info

on her:

She developed a love of the natural world which she closely observed and painted

from an early age. Her parents were artistic and interested in nature and the out of doors. W

hile Beatrix was happily never sent off to boarding school, her education in languages,

literature, science and history was broad and she was an eager student. Although she was provided with private art lessons, Beatrix preferred to develop her own style, particularly favoring watercolor. In her twenties, she concentrated on the study of fungi mycology, of ancient artifacts archeology, and of geology, and achieved a measure of respect from the scientific establishment for her reproduction of fungi spores and her scientific illustrations. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit publishing it privately, and then in 1902 as a small, three-color illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. Between 1902 and 1918 she published over twenty popular children’s books.

With the proceeds from the books and a small legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village in the English Lake District near Ambleside. Over the next several decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913 at the age of 47 she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Potter became a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write and illustrate children's’ books for Warne after her marriage until the duties of land management and diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue. Beatrix Potter published over twenty-three books; the best are those written between 1902 and 1918. Potter died on 22 December 1943 at Castle Cottage, Near Sawrey, leaving almost all of her property to National Trust. She is credited with preserving much of the land that now comprises the Lake District National Park.

E. B White's Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White (1952)

It's a very easy book to read aloud. The sentence structure lends itself to being verbalised easily. And White's use of language is beautifully olden day. I remember that one of my professors said, "You want to book not to tell you what's going on, but to show you." (The 'showing' is not in regards to illustrations but in the use of language and sentences; structure and narrative.) This is one of those books.

I liked this little paragraph from the second chapter. I thought it is very cute in the way it shows us (the reader) the bond that has occurred:

Carrying a bottle of milk, Fern sat down under the apple tree inside the yard. Wilbur ran to her and she held the bottle for him while he sucked. When he had finished the last drop, he grunted and walked sleepily into the box. Fern peered though the door. Wilbur was poking the straw with his snout. In a short time he had dug a tunnel in the straw. He crawled into the tunnel and disappeared from sight, completely covered with straw. Fern was enchanted.

White gives enough information for us to draw the scene in our own minds and to enjoy the fanciful notions of feeding a thankful pig, who sleepily moves into his little kennel, as we, like Fern, watch what he's doing. White cleverly leads us through the scene without over powering us with every detail, or telling us outright what we should be seeing in our own mind's eye. There's a life breathed into the text which makes it interesting to read. It holds our interest as we watch it unfold.

I thought this bit was very cute too:

If she took her doll for a walk in the doll carriage, Wilbur followed along. Sometimes, on these journeys, Wilbur would get tired, and Fern would pick him up and put him in the carriage along side the doll. He liked this. And if he was very tired, he would close his eyes and go to sleep under the doll's blanket. He looked so cute when his eyes were closed, because his lashes were so long.

Isn't it fun to imagine a little pig in a doll's carriage falling asleep, like a baby would being pushed around?! And the little detail of long eyelashes makes it all the more 'real', in a sense.