The Baby Alien Invasion: On Tour with Pamela Butchart

Pamela Butchart on tour

When year 3 and 4 pupils at Yewdale Primary in Carlisle returned from lunch-break to find that one of their teachers had dissolved into a pile of green jelly it took a lot of courage not to run screaming from the room.

The class had just finished reading Pamela Butchart’s Baby Aliens Got My Teacher and so of course instantly jumped to the worst conclusion – Mr Hyde had been abducted by aliens! Pupils set out to solve the mystery of Mr Hyde’s disappearance, filming their investigations on i-pads and keeping journals of their findings. Luckily Mr Hyde managed to escape the aliens and make his way back to class, but the mystery of what happened that day and the lingering smell of green jelly may never be forgotten.

These strange occurrences are not unusual when on tour with Blue Peter Award winning author Pamela Butchart. Pamela travelled the length and breadth of Cumbria this July on the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour, talking to captive audiences about her brilliantly bonkers books; Baby Aliens Got My Teacher, The Spy Who Loved School Dinners and My Head Teacher is a Vampire Rat. On the road Pamela was confronted with alien takeovers, child-eating crisps, school dinner spies and vampire rats.

Pamle Butchart on tour

Pamela talked to pupils about how she finds inspiration in seemingly ordinary things; pupils were delighted to hear that a single crisp could spark an idea for a story and had fun making up their own crisp stories featuring, among other things, pirates, dinosaurs and intergalactic space travellers! Pupils also let their imaginations run wild crafting aliens out of plasticine and narrowly avoided having their brains invaded by tiny baby aliens during a white-knuckle game of heads down thumbs up.

Pamela’s events were lively, interactive and brilliant fun and pupils were left buzzing with ideas for their own mad-cap stories. A huge thank you to Pamela and all of the teachers and pupils who we visited in Cumbria for a fantastic week!

Congratulations to Rosalind Waddell who won a signed copy of Pamela’s newest book Petunia Perry and the Curse of the Ugly Pigeon in our competition.








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