The World Book Day Experts Answer Your Questions

Want tips on how to share books with your children or your classroom? Read great creative ideas from our experts! We have a selection of articles by experts on all sorts of topics related to reading for example how to get you children interested in different genres and how to inspire creative writing.

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Can you recommend a good book of poems that we can share as a family? Our children are six, nine and twelve and enjoy listening and joining in with rhymes

There are some lovely anthologies available at the moment, many of which provide a mixture of traditional rhymes, classic poems […]

My (just) 8-year-old son loves being read to, and always has. He is the youngest in his year group and was put under a lot of pressure to start reading aged 4-5. I just don’t think he was ready and it has really put him off. He reads quite well now and his school encourages 15 minutes of reading at home every day. We mostly manage this but it’s often a real effort to get him to sit and read. I long for him to enjoy his reading – how can I instil this love?

It’s important to remove any traces of pressure from the daily reading ration and appear completely unpressured yourself: difficult to […]

I’ve been asked to set up a reading group for 12-year-olds and above in my school/library/youth group. How do I keep members interested when there’s so much else going on?

I’ve gathered some great tips through talking to the school librarians on the honour list for the 2013 School Librarian […]

Phew! I’ve just remembered it’s Roald Dahl Day! What’s happening?

You’ve just got time to register for Puffin Virtually Live at http://www.puffinvirtuallylive.co.uk/author/roalddahlday2013 and catch the interactive Mischief and Mayhem event at […]

I’m trying to read to my twins, now just over one-year-old, but they seem to find it hard to concentrate long enough for me to get through a whole book. What can you suggest in the way of titles and hints about how to do it?

It’s so good that you’re spending time sharing books with your toddlers and of course it is quite a challenge […]

If friends and relatives were thinking of giving books to Prince George or his parents (or any new baby) what would you suggest they chose?

I always hope some friends and relatives will give babies books. Unlike clothes and toys, neither the baby itself nor […]

I’ve been looking at picture books for my one-year-old and am surprised by how many of them feature animals. We don’t have any pets and I am not very interested in animals (and I’m not sure that my daughter is either). Is there a good reason why so many picture books show animal characters? Even when there is a human child in a story, it often has an animal friend.

First, you are right! There are a very large number of picture books about animals. From as far back as […]

My eight-year-old still loves stories with pictures. If I am reading a book aloud, we like to share the pictures and find that, far from reducing his (or my) imagination about the story, it enhances it and we learn more. Why are so few contemporary stories for this age group published with pictures? Can you recommend some good ones?

As we live in an increasingly visual age, I think there are many eight-year-olds who, like your son, would love […]

The summer holiday is looming! We are going camping and I want something to read to the whole family in the evenings or if it is wet! I’d also like some recommendations for the children individually as in term time they are mostly too busy to read a lot but I think they could get back into it in the holiday. They are girls of 12 and 10 and a boy of 8.

The long days of the summer holiday sound blissful! I hope you are camping somewhere that it doesn’t rain too […]

My partner and I are keen to introduce our primary school age children to literature from around the world, but it seems there are very few books available for children in translation. How can I find out more?

Only a handful of titles published for children (and indeed adults) each year are translations – compare this to up […]

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