Struggling Readers

How a Book is Made – The Illustrator

Meet Matt Timson, illustrator. Matt drew all the pictures on the cover and inside the exciting Lone Wolf book. Matt is going to tell you about how he brought this dark and frightening tale to life with images. Matt… Read More

How a Book is Made – The Editor

Meet Cathy Martin, editor. Cathy is the Commissioning Editor for all the ‘Read On’ books including, of course, Lone Wolf. This means she came up with ideas for the books and found authors and illustrators to… Read More

How a Book is Made: The Designer

Meet Nigel Jordan, graphic designer. Nigel designed all the inside pages for the Read On books, include Lone Wolf. Nigel is going to tell you about how he put the words and pictures together in the… Read More

The influence of comics

When I started cooperating with my son Robbie on The Name is Kade and Gladiator, we were both aware that young readers now have a lot more competition for their time than when I was a kid in the Fifties… Read More

Writing ‘The Edge’ – Alan Gibbons

Writing about issues such as domestic violence, you always risk sounding preachy. It is easy to let your desire to do the subject justice take over the narrative. When I started writing The Edge, I knew that the story had to come first. Read More

Drawing Stories with Neill Cameron

A uniquely brilliant thing about comics is simply that they tell a story through drawings. This makes the experience of reading a comic a fantastic collaboration between the creator and the reader, who has to use their own imagination to join those pictures together into a story.    … Read More

Comics – the gateway to reading

Every single week when I was a child there was no other experience like holding in my own hand the latest and unread issue of my favourite comic. It was called Boys World, and that feeling of trembling excitement every Friday when it dropped through the letterbox was pure delight. Read More

Starting a Story – Catherine MacPhail

  It’s the simple things that give us the best ideas for stories. I was walking along the street and I heard a boy talking on his mobile phone. All I could hear him saying was, ‘I know, I know, this is my last chance.’ I thought, ‘Last chance… Read More

Teaching Skulduggery Pleasant

Compelling characterisation The exciting action in Skulduggery Pleasant is played out by well defined and, at times, mysterious characters as written by author Derek Landy. In particular, the two main characters, the skeleton detective, Skulduggery Pleasant, and young Stephanie Edgley, break stereotypical moulds as they… Read More

Ready for the new Programme of Study?

Welcome back to a new school year! And what an interesting one it will be, as it’s all change for the National Curriculum. In July, the government announced details of its draft curriculum, including the new statutory Programmes of Study (PoS) which will be introduced from September 2014 for key… Read More