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.

Beware of the Frog by William Bee

Beware of the Frog - William Bee (pub: 2008)

What a fun book, which turns the idea of knight (frog) in shining armour 'hero', to be bested by another hero in the book.

'Sweet old Mrs. Collywobbles lives on the edge of a big, dark, scary wood, so it’s a good thing that she has a pet frog to protect her. Too bad for the Greedy Goblin, the Smelly Troll, and the Giant Hungry Ogre, who don’t take this little amphibian seriously (GOBBLE)!'

There are fun little ditties which the 'baddies' say, but mixed with humour and grotesquely represented, they don't seems so scary at all.

At first reading, children of age 3 and 4 years old, might be a little worried, but once the first reading is over, this book will be asked for time and time again.

With rhymes, funny names, humour, great and colourful illustrations, with a fun twist at the end, I thoroughly recommend this book as an addition to any home library. Addictive reading for children mainly aged 3 - 5 years.

Rapunzel's Golden Locks retold by Emily Gale

Rapunzel's Golden Locks retold by Emily Gale, illustrations Barbara Vagnozzi

This recent publication of Ladybird Books, is a new take on an old story of Rapunzel. It is aimed at the age group 4 - 7 years old, I suspect, although the language is younger and the way the story ends abruptly, leads me to think that it is for children younger. Gale retells the story with brevity, leaving out characters, such as the mother, who is the one who was craving radishes whilst pregnant with Rapunzel.

Wiki says:

"Rapunzel" is a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm, and first published in 1812 as part of Children's and Household Tales. It is one of the best known fairy tales, and its plot has been used and parodied by many cartoonists and comedians, its best known line ("Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair") having entered popular culture.

Gale leaves in the refrain of 'let down your hair', the witch and the prince, but puts a feminist spin on things as the prince is fooled by the witch, and Rapunzel is able to free herself by finding a secret door, hence not needing a man to rescue her. She does, however, ride off on his motorbike into the sunset as he is commenting on how much he likes her new hair do.

This is a weird take on the fairy tale, Rapunzel, and with so many mixed messages of imposed ideologies, it is nothing short of beguiling when trying to analyze it. However, children do not generally analyze books, especially one as silly as this one, so they may enjoy it. The Ladybird edition comes with a CD reading of the book, which is just as silly with sound effects and such, as the book itself is. Quite hand in glove.

Where Is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek

Where Is the Green Sheep? - Mem Fox and Judy Horacek (Pub: 2004)

Another brilliant book by Mem Fox, illustrated by Judy Horacek.

It's a fun whimsical book all about finding the green sheep. As we search though the book, we read a sentence a page, of different kinds of sheep: the clown sheep, the up sheep, the down sheep etc.

Fox uses the rhyme and rhythm, and the idea of opposites to help children understand differences within each picture, whilst still keeping the premise by returning to the refrain question: But where's the green sheep?

"This is another most beautiful book for little people by Mem Fox. It also has wonderful simple illustrations which are a delight to look at. The rhythmical prose is so simple but so enjoyable to read. "

It has become so popular that it has joined that rare group of books printed both in paperback, hardback, and board book, as well as, now being published with plush toy included.

A great book for children 4months and up to 5 years old.