Lizzie and the birds

Here is my picture book, Lizzie and the Birds, that I wrote with my husband Mick. We are so proud of it. It is a rip-roaring adventure about what happens when Lizzie, yearning for friendship after moving house, encounters a terrifying tornado (mu ha ha ha!) and has her world turned upside down by a rag-taggle bunch of feathery fellows!

I had always wanted to write a children’s book and having an artist as a husband meant we could illustrate it ourselves! I also wanted to be able to use it in schools to encourage reading and speaking and listening and to generate all different forms of writing, so I created a teacher’s handbook to accompany it!
It is full of detailed lesson plans, ideas and resources to help the book be used in any classroom. There is also a comprehension ‘test’ and GPS ‘test’ created to be used with the book. A bank of power-points and writing sheets were produced to give teachers everything they need! We really wanted everything at your finger-tips to bring Lizzie and the Birds to life!

You can purchase both of these directly from www.prim-ed.com, on Amazon or through Madeleine Lindley Book Sellers in Manchester.
Here I am introducing Lizzie and the Birds to the world! https://youtu.be/t5QnskcaZXM

We hope you love the story about a feisty, young girl with the huge imagination, as it is a story of hope and love. She has a rather over protective father who tries to give her all the love she could possibly need, but she wants to find friendship and have fun and dreams of the great friends she might have one day. Little does she know that all the friends she could ever need are all around her, just waiting to come into her life.

I wanted every page to be packed with story and to give the readers lots of different characters to meet and fall in love with. I also wanted teachers to feel they could use our book to create really engaging learning opportunities. It has been used by lots of schools to do just that. Pupils have used the setting of the story to become their own authors. Here’s an example of year 2 guided writing:

When the tornado rips up the countryside pupils have responded by becoming the tornado itself and writing in role or creating newspaper reports of the events:

One imaginative teacher created chaos in his Year 3 class to make it look like the tornado had actually attacked!
By using props, such as a tabard of the tornado and a scarf, pupils have brought the tornado to life and had great fun recreating his voice!
Here’s a sample of Year 2 helping me bring our tornado to life!

Some teachers have taught lots of the GPS activities to the book, including the teaching of superlatives

Other teachers have had great fun writing in role as the different characters. Here is a year 4 child writing a letter of apology as Buster the cat, who had some very interesting ideas for what he might do with the birds, but is extremely sorry for his terrible behaviour:

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