Tall Tales at the Town Hall - Family Reading Day - aAh! Magazine

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Tall Tales at the Town Hall – Family Reading Day

22nd October 2013 By aAh! 0 292

Relaxing in the MCBF Story Reading Corner

Words and photographs by Neil Harrison 
As part of The Manchester Literature Festival,  a host of children’s authors and performers, including much-loved  Cbeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell, gathered at Manchester’s Town Hall on  Sunday to enchant local children with wild and wonderful stories at a  Family Reading Day. 

Author Petr Horacek creates live illustrations

The event – a precursor to next year’s Manchester Children’s Book Festival – saw Cerrie read to starstruck children from her debut book Snowflakes. She was joined on the day by children’s writer and illustrator, Petr Horacek, poetry slam champion Dommy B, educational theatre company, Artful Playground, and author of the Danny Baker Record Breaker books, Steve Hartley.   

Explaining  to the children and parents why she believes that encouraging children  to read at home is important, and what motivated her to write her own  book, Cerrie said, 

“I’m  going to tell you a little secret about me – I couldn’t read until I  was 8-years-old. But I was very lucky because I had a lovely Mummy who  read lots of stories to me. So Mums and Dads, if you are not confident  readers or you have little ones who aren’t confident readers themselves,  please do keep on reading stories to them, because that is the way in.”  

Cbeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell reading from her book

“It  wasn’t difficult [to write the book] because I had a very clear idea of  what I wanted to do. My main objective was to get a little girl in the  book who looked like Mia (the book’s main character), because my  daughter looks like Mia. I was looking in the shops all over the place  to try to find a little girl in a picture book who looked like her and I  couldn’t find very many. So my objective was to have a mixed-race child  in a picture book and then the story sort of happened around that.” 
“The  process of writing a picture book is very long, because you do all the  writing and then the illustrator has to do all the drawing. So it took  about two and a half years. Actually, a lot of that time was spent  creating the book here in Manchester.”

Between  performances, the kids were able to enjoy a plethora of craft and  reading activities, which were partly organised by Manchester  Metropolitan University. Kaye Tew and James Draper of MMU were at the  event in order to help promote Manchester Children’s Book Festival (MCBF) 2014. Kaye explained further, 

Drawing Sea Monkeys with MMU’s James Draper

“As well as setting up the MCBF Story  Reading Corner, James and I are here today encouraging children to draw  ‘sea monkeys’, which feature in one of our main books for next year’s  festival – Oliver And The Seawigs, by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre.  The publishers Oxford University Press have very kindly allowed us to  use the artwork from the book in our promotional material for MCBF 2014.  Sadly, the kids are much better at drawing than we are!” 

The  children’s drawings will be used to  generate a gallery of sea monkeys  for the land and sea-themed MCBF Family Fun Day on 28th June 2014.

Beaming  children, many clutching new (freshly autographed) books, left the  event with parents who appeared equally pleased. One satisfied parent, a  mother of two, told me, 
“Any opportunity to get our  kids reading is fine by us. If it encourages them to pick up a book,  rather than look at a screen, that’s fantastic. They’ve really enjoyed  today, it’s been brilliant. We can’t wait for the [Children’s] Book  Festival now.”

Neil  Harrison studies Social History at MMU, he is an aspriring writer, an  awful guitar player and a proud father. Follow him on Twitter @looseriver 

About the author /

aAh!

aAh! Magazine is Manchester Metropolitan University's arts and culture magazine.

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