We felt honoured to have Lauren Child, the multi award winning author, visit us on Friday morning! It was fascinating to listen as she told us all about how she writes her books and creates her illustrations. The characters Clarice Bean, Charlie and Lola, Ruby Redfort (along with Lauren’s many other picture books) have been a big part of our school’s reading collection for many years and to get the opportunity to learn how they were created was just magical.  Lauren has just published a brand new Clarice Bean book called ‘Clarice Bean Scram!’ Which the children had the opportunity to buy before it is released on the 26th May and have personalised and signed. I think a lot of the books will have been read and finished by Monday!

The children were hooked as she talked about how her characters evolved, how long it takes her to write books and what inspires her stories. Lauren draws her characters and then cuts them out so that she can re arrange them around the page until she is happy with where they are. Then she creates the final illustration by collage. We also learnt that some of Lauren’s books have taken years to write which helps us realise stories can’t just be written in a few English lessons! I know the children were inspired by the visit, Miss Hennelley’s class have already planned to start writing stories and creating illustrations by collage on Monday!

Take a look at the Lower School and Middle School class blogs to hear a little more https://inskip.lancs.sch.uk/blog/2022-05-22-11-38-18-lauren-child-s-visit  and https://inskip.lancs.sch.uk/blog/2022-05-20-15-10-06-middle-school-meet-lauren-child 

We invited children from Treales Primary School and Copp Primary School to share the experience with us, I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did!

Keep your eye out for photos of the event in the Lancashire Evening Post as their photographer came to take photos. 

Another huge big thank you to Elaine Silverwood for so generously bringing Lauren to our school, we are very lucky! There are a few signed copies of the books ‘Clarice Bean Scram!’ And ‘Clarice Bean Utterly Me’ available at Book, Bean and Ice Cream the bookshop in Kirkham if you would like to get a copy for yourself. Thank you also to Jake Hope for his support and questions for Lauren.

Lauren Child NEWS