The pictures of Emily and Stanley’s adventures include a door from their house. Draw a scene showing what might be on the other side of a magic door. Phoebe ‘read’ the story to her own toy rabbit and made a special picture to send to the Queen telling her she can’t have bunnywunny. I wanted you to have a sense of Hiccup growing up and see how a hero is made, right from the beginning. What I was able to do was give the feeling that you’re going on a quest without realising it. In fact, you don’t realise until book 8 that Hiccup has got this major quest to go on. I am interested in people who think outside the box and who are surprising; Gandhi is another great leader who grew up in a world and suddenly realised that they have to change things. In book 8 you suddenly realise that Hiccup has been going on this quest without realising it; throughout the books he’s finding the king’s lost things (the posh word for that is the heroes’ attributes) so I planned the quest right from the beginning but I don’t necessarily let the reader know. As a child, Cowell states she "grew up in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland," [5] and that it was during summers spent on the Inner Hebrides, [6] where she first began to develop her writing and drawing skills: When children are familiar with the story they might like to join in, perhaps with the rat-a tat-tats and Emily’s replies to the series of visitors trying to make her swap Stanley for gifts. Talk about the story

Since we are talking about growing and learning and you mentioned have children, have they been introduced to your books? How did they respond? Children's author Cressida Cowell scoops philosophers' award for fight against stupidity". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 June 2017.Read the story aloud to your child allowing time to talk about what is happening in the story or pictures Join in Some of the text in the story is written in different sizes and in bold / italics. Could you type your own story and use different text styles to emphasise particular parts of the writing?

Look at the fonts used in the book title and throughout the story. Could you design a new title using interesting and exciting fonts? Dragonese is the language of the dragons in the books. How did you create the vocabulary, is there a general formula or is it random for each translation? Imagine that the Queen sent a letter to Emily instead of sending her Chief Footman / Admiral etc. What would the letter say? Could you write it? What would Emily say in reply? Look at the different colours, textures and patterns used in the story. How would you describe them? Can you try to recreate some of them?Look at the use of speech marks in the story. Can you write your own sentences / paragraphs that use speech marks accurately? I love my pets! I adore Pigeon! She’s a puppy and they’re naughty. I’m very keen on animals and I think you can see that. The dragons are a mixture; there are trainable dragons and there are wilder dragons, I don’t just have one type. Dragons represent nature and always have done. I wanted to explore the idea of our control of nature through dragon riding. I wanted to have symbols of wild nature to explore our relationship with wilderness. My father was an environmentalist; he was chairman of Kew Gardens and chairman of the RSPB, and there are a lot of environmental themes in my books.