Just because I haven’t written on my blog for a year, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy, but school visits have been impossible, of course, during lockdown and because of all the restrictions necessary to help stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. During that time, however, I’ve written and have had published a number of books.

At the end of 2019, Steve at Ransom Publishing, for whom I’d already written a lot of books, approached me and Cath Jones with a project, which he had already started. It was a completely new set of reading books, fiction and non-fiction, that followed the DfE Letters and Sounds to the letter! This begins with the very basic phonics (the sounds made by the first set of letters – a, s, t, etc) and moves on through all the letter sounds, sounds made by digraphs (eg sh, oa, ng…) to more complicated combinations of letters to make different sounds. OK so far?

What he wanted was that Cath and I produce fiction and non-fiction to fit each of the rules of phonics. So we set to and wrote for all we were worth for about three months, into February 2020. Not a good time, pandemic considered, to publish these books, but publish Steve did. He wrote many books, too, and is responsible for the illustrations – either using online resource for photographs for the non-fiction titles or hiring illustrators for the fiction.

These books are Brilliant!! Hopefully, they’re selling well now schools are up and running again!

Here are some of level 3:

Level 4:

Level 5:

My favourite illustrator is Andy Hamilton, who made such a brilliant job of The Queen’s Quoit, The Fresh Load, Robbing Hood, and Skipper Kipper and the Treasure Chest.

Other books published are:

So that’s what I’ve been up to, as well as writing other stuff… exciting news for the next blog!