John Fardell Book Week 2012

John Fardell visited P5 and P3 on World Book Day, Thursday 1st March. John talked about how he builds his stories. Sometimes, it's a good idea for an adventure story like the Seven Professors of the Far North series. Sometimes, he builds up a story from pictures and doodles, then adds words to make a picture book story.  He read The Day Louis Got Eaten, and showed how the story developed from the first sketches and ideas.

In both sessions, John and the children created a story from pictures  - with different children drawing pictures, choosing names for characters and working out what could happen next.  There were some scary-looking monsters by the end of the story!

John talked about how he uses models to help get the pictures to look absolutely right. Everyone loved the model of the plane he used to draw the Silver Turtle aeroplane, photographs at different angles made drawing much easier.  Equally fascinating was the model of the rock-climbing machine invented by Louis' sister Sarah - lots of people wanted to know how that worked too.

Everyone enjoyed the day and many people went off with new ideas for story writing - brilliant!