One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published. Most children love acting and it’s a tremendous way to improve their reading. come high up onto our tiptoes very quietly), he listened to the tunes. He put down the flumflum and he grabbed the Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. Look at the different colour and shades used in the story. Can you use different art materials to create shades of the same colour?

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I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Lots of discussion and child led ideas, in the end a child climbed the tree and pushed it down, three children stood at the bottom waiting to catch it, saw it was about to fall, got scared and ran out of the way (good risk assessing from the 3 year olds) and watermelon survived the fall… lift up one foot, then the other foot, and one hand and no hands) and he found a crew: Rose and Stu. Granny came down A set of Thinking Hat resources have kindly been contributed by Peter Fogarty (see Resources below).Granny caught the moozles. Make a poster to teach people how to stay healthy and try to avoid catching colds. IVE FOUND A FLUM FLUM!” Rattled through the trees at one point, we went over to have a look, sure enough there was a “flum flum”.

I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. I said to the children that they could play with the things in the log circle and I left them to play, we had children drumming, puppet play, children chasing other children with sharks, children playing quietly with the slime, tent pegs being hammered into the ground and 1 child throwing spotty hankies into the air and watching them fall to the ground for s very, VERY long time, every child totally focused on something …. Stupidly in my head the children would have all sat around at the end of the session and tried some nice, juicy watermelon. Reality was 2 children sat for 30 minutes hammering tent pegs into it with wooden spoons (loose parts, gross motor skills and hand eye co ordination). We managed to remove the tent pegs, save most of the water melon and the children had a bit to try to finish…