Jo Cotterill

Whew! It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’m really lucky to be able to get out and about to do events in schools full of amazing kids and staff. A huge THANK YOU to the following for hosting me recently:

Hinckley Academy, Leicester
St Nicolas Junior School, Newbury
Ducklington Primary, Witney
Prestfelde School,Shrewsbury
Hounslow Schools Library Services
Beaumont Leys, Leicester

I have done lots of driving, and laughed a lot, and drunk a lot of tea. And several pupils have emailed me through this site to say how much they enjoyed my visit, which is very lovely to hear. My brain is kind of scrambled now, but highlights have been:

• the school of 250 pupils where FIFTY-EIGHT of them bought my books
• the school that greeted me with a drama performance based on JELLY and a Y7-organised performance of my song Happy Face from the book
• the school that has implemented a rule that says every single Y7 and Y8 lesson starts with 10 mins of silent reading, every day
• the group of pupils with behavioural difficulties that came to hear my presentation and stayed to listen all the way through, even though I’d been warned some of them might leave
• the Y9 group who were unwilling to laugh at my jokes but who became completely focused when I started talking about the way we treat each other and how we should be aware of other people’s difficulties as well as our own
• the Y8 boy who told me in a workshop that he enjoyed reading ‘esoteric’ books such as Animal Farm, and then wrote an astonishingly good piece based on a picture
• the adorable girl who spontaneously hugged me after I signed her book, prompting her three friends to do the same
• the teacher who told me that my site jellybook.club was AWESOME and that she’d found it incredibly helpful in her class lessons, and I’d saved her hours of work!
• the young boy who came up to tell me he had loved reading Jelly and that he ‘couldn’t put it down’

Below are a handful of photos from the past couple of weeks. Thank you to the schools for posting them on Twitter! Click on any of the images to see the larger version (and it’s definitely worth doing that for the pieces of work the pupils have done – they’re amazing!)

Next week I am visiting five schools in Shrewsbury over two days – looking forward to meeting you all at St Leonard’s, Castlefields, West Felton, Baschuch and Wilfred Owen!