It has been great to meet up with all our Champion Schools this week.  Schools and libraries are brimmimg with enthusiasm and ideas for working together on the Award.  Keep an eye on the blog for examples of the activities that children are getting up to whilst reading all the shortlisted books.

The Children's Book Award 2015

Introducing the Children's Book Award 2015 working group (from left to right) Tom Batten,

Carol Hales, Jenny Gordon and Gary Green.

Here's what they had to say about their favourite books on the shortlist.

"My favourite book is The Dragonsitter's Island. I love the clever way that the story is told through the emails and that the illustrations are photo attachments. And I think it would be quite fun to look after a couple of friendly dragons!" - Carol

"I loved reading Hairy Horror despite the fact that, like the Anna in the story, I'm very scared of spiders! I think it would be great to have a big brother like Hal, and I'm sure he could invent some wonderful things to liven up my life." - Anna

"My favourite book is Queen Sardine. I love cats and have a ginger and white one of my own, who like fish (and hates dogs) as much as Queen Sardine, but unfortunately he can't talk! I wonder what he'd say about her? I'm sure he'd be very happy living with kind-hearted Ivy, as long as he could sleep on her bed all day!" - Jenny

"The 13th Fairy is my favourite book from the shortlist, because of Grimbleshanks' pet crow Bill, and his laid-back attitude to life. I'd love to join the Old Bill Beaky Band and write some songs for them! Perhaps we could perform at Princess Beauty's wedding?" - Gary

"Chicken Mission was my favourite book. An imaginative adventure that put me in mind of Aardman Animations, I'd love to know what exploits Amy, Ruth and Boo embark on next! Best of all the book doesn't shy away from a good pun!" - Tom

 

Children's Library Festival Animation Workshop Videos

Jellytree Workshops ran some stop-frame animation sessions at Epsom, Farnham and Woking libraries. These were run as part of our Off The Page Festival for children. The results were great, as you can see below.

Farnham Library animation workshop 

Woking Library animation workshop

Epsom Library animation workshop

Surrey Libraries' Festival for Children

Following on from our Children's Book Award, our Festival for Children begins next Saturday. We have lots of book and story related events running in many of our libraries between 24th May and 12th July. It all starts with a creative writing workshop led by Young People's Laureate for Wales, Martin Daws, at Ashford Library. Other events include authors such as A F Harrold and Jane Lawes talking about their books, storytellers, stop-frame animation, crafts, comic and manga drawing workshops, drumming, multi-lingual rhymetimes and Pebble parties. The full list of events can be found here.

St Matthew's School art workshop

St Matthew's School ran a workshop as a finale to the Children's Book Award.

As you can see the Year 3 and Year 4 pupils created some very individual and imaginative book jackets based on the 'My Funny Family' books and were truly inspired by meeting children's author Chris Higgins.

The children had fun at the Book Award Ceremony

We mentioned that the children from our Champion schools came up on stage and gave presentations during the Children's Book award Ceremony.

This included:

• St John's school performing a Magical Peppers role play.
• South Camberley writing their own adventure for Claude and Sir Bobblysocks and producing book adverts.
• Kingfield  school talking about and showing the art work they had created.
• Loseley field school shared their thoughts about the shortlisted books.
• Weyfield Primary school made a tap dance video.
• St Bartholomew's school read out their reviews and shared their artwork.

These were all fantastic. Well done to all of the children.

Loseley Fields Primary School have allowed us to share their artwork here. It looks like they had a lot of fun being a Champion School.

Surrey Libraries' Children's Book Award Winner Announced

We are so pleased to announce that the winner of Surrey Libraries' 2014 Children's Book Award is Steve Hartley, for his book "Oliver Fibbs: Attack of the Alien Brain".

This year over 900 children sent in their votes for the five shortlisted books. From the reviews on our blog we can see why the children enjoyed Steve's book so much.

Steve was presented with the award at a ceremony held in Woking on 30th April. This was a fun event, with all the shortlisted authors (Atinuke, Alex T Smith, Chris Higgins, Sian Pattenden and Steve Hartley) either taking part or sending messages of thanks. Both Steve and Sian came to the event and entertained us with stories about their lives as writers. All of the Champion schools also came to the ceremony and the children gave fantastic presentations and showed videos they had created about the shortlisted books.

Following the award presentation Steve sent us this message of thanks.

Hi Everyone!

I just wanted to say a huge, mega “thank you” for making Oliver Fibbs Attack of the Alien Brain the 2014 Surrey Libraries Children’s Book of the Year. I am absolutely chuffed to bits!
I really didn’t expect to win because the other books were all so brilliant. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I? You read them all!

Your presentations were fab: tap-dancing, magic, acting, stories, illustrations, TV adverts, and fancy rocks! You all clearly had loads of fun doing activities based on the five short-listed books. That is what awards like this are all about – showing how great stories are. Oliver Fibbs won the 
award, but books were the real winners.

Thank you once again, and KEEP READING!!!

Steve Hartley

(a.k.a. "The Fibster")

Well done to Steve and thank you to all of our five shortlisted authors for writing such great books and being involved with this years Off the Page Surrey Libraries' Children's Book Award. A big thank you to all the schools and Chatterbooks groups involved in championing the award too. The reviews and art you have shared on this blog have been brilliant.