Jack Meggitt-Phillips

We were incredibly lucky to have been visited by Jack Meggitt-Phillips, the author of the 'Beast and the Bethany' series. We were taken on a writing journey where we had to imagine our favourite place and describe it in detail. Jack inspired us all as authors to describe everything using our senses, imagining it as if we were there. The next part of our story was when something went wrong... 'But then'...we were encouraged to build tension and add as many problems as we could. To finish our stories, we came up with a resolution for the ending and Jack explained that this is how a lot of fiction writing works-many stories can be built from using this strategy. Jack read a passage of his latest book, 'The Battle of the Beast'. We had so much fun and Jack was very entertaining and inspirational. Jack explained that he writes every day and has done since he was ten years old. He explained that his favourite part of writing is developing the characters and the most difficult part of writing is when you get stuck. His advice was to go for a walk and take a break for a short while. For the Beast and the Bethany stories, he explained that one of the characters was based on himself and he took inspiration from many children he had met for the Bethany character. This just shows that we can get inspiration anywhere!

Ian Brown

We have been incredibly lucky to have had a visit from Ian Brown, the author of the 'Albert Upside Down' series and the more recent 'Hugg and Bugg' series. Ian visited the KS1 classes and explained that Albert the tortoise was based on a tortoise that his wife found as a child in Gravesend. Albert has been in their family for over 50 years and he is believed to be approximately 80 years old. Ian read a variety of his stories to the children and explained where he got his ideas from. It was very interesting to find out that he came up with the original idea for 'Hugg and Bugg' when he was seven years old. He kept coming back to the story and changing elements of it and now it is a published book. What an aspirational story for all of our young budding writers! The children were captivated by Ian’s stories and hopefully it will inspire them with their own creative writing. Ian had some important messages for the children about resilience and not giving up, just like Albert the tortoise. He also reminded them to keep working on their handwriting, spelling and of course to keep enjoying their reading.