Vivian French tour roundup
Kicking off the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour for 2015 the intrepid touring team headed south to Birmingham with the brilliant Vivian French. Vivian has published over 200 fiction, non-fiction, plays and picture books and is wildly popular with children of all ages.
Over the course of a jam-packed week Vivian shared her passion for stories and imagination with over 2000 primary school pupils from 11 different schools. A fantastic actor and storyteller, Vivian’s schools event focussed on the hugely popular Tales from the Five Kingdoms series and captivated pupils with tales of a magical world populated with ogres, witches, werewolves, zombies and some very silly royals! Pupils were also encouraged to make up their own stories, resulting in some weird and wonderful tales featuring an angry jaguar, a feisty kangaroo, and an extremely hungry monster.
After each event pupils were left buzzing and excited to read more of Vivian’s books, evidenced by the huge queues for book sales after each event and the swarms of new fans eager to have their book signed by Vivian. As one teacher said “The feedback I got was amazing! The children are all really buzzing this morning! I am sure that for many of the children, yesterday was the first time they have ever bought a book!”
The schools had done some brilliant projects inspired by Vivian’s books. One school transformed the library into a fairytale kingdom and gathered the pupils to tell stories and eat marshmallows in front of an indoor campfire, at another school pupils became fashion designers and designed ghoulish dresses for the evil Lady Lamorna.
A huge thank you to Vivian French for a fantastic week and to all of the wonderful pupils and staff at every school for their enthusiasm and energy!
For those not lucky enough to go to school in Birmingham we ran a competition to win a copy of The Robe of Skulls signed by Vivian. The lucky winner was Annette Barnes from Lancashire.
