Kjartan Poskitt: On Tour

In June we took Kjartan Poskitt out on The Scottish Friendly Children's Book Tour around Stirling and Perth & Kinross. Maths is often seen as dull, boring and useless but not by Kjartan – he dazzled and showed pupils how exciting, useful and entertaining maths can be. Kjartan drops by the blog this week to fill you in on what it's like being out on tour with the Scottish Book Trust team.

It started with a text message telling me to meet two strangers outside Glasgow Central station who would then drive me to ... a hotel which featured a stag’s head sticking out of one side of a wall, and the stag’s bottom sticking out of the other side. Awesome! I already knew that I was going to have the most brilliant time touring Scotland with Scottish Book Trust.

Over the next three days I did 6 school gigs plus a teacher conference, spoke to over 1,000 people, I saw the sort of rich scenery that I thought only existed on shortbread tins and fell in love with the Falkirk Wheel (a giant machine for lifting boats). I also made a couple of best mates in SBT’s Chris and Claire who got me to the right places and made sure everybody clapped on cue.

But the thing that really made the trip rock was the kids. Let’s face it, I’m a bald old English bloke coming to talk about maths for an hour. What kind of a welcome should I expect from groovy young Scottish dudes? It turned out to be fantastic.

The audiences ranged from 60 little keen giggling faces in lovely Abernethy (where you  borrow a big iron key from the Tea Shop and climb the ancient Stone Tower!)  to a crowd of over 300 in Aberfeldy,  many of whom had travelled down from tiny schools in the hills to see me. For the tour I’d been doing a snazzy 60-minute powerpoint presentation to illustrate the strange facts and odd tricks that I put into my Murderous Maths books, but halfway through the Aberfeldy gig I abandoned the script. It was one of the rawest and most responsive crowds I’d had all year, and so I did one of my old number routines which ends with sheepish kids having to kiss each other. Chris told me afterwards that even grown teachers were sobbing with laughter... gosh it’s nice when you get a crowd like that!

So let me take this chance to thank all the kids, the teachers, the local organisers and of course the SBT for giving me such a fabulous and memorable trip!

You can find out more about Kjartan and the world of maths from his website.

Other News:

Stephanie Meyer's new title in the Twilight series  The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner has hit sales over one million copies - resulting in more than a million dollars in donations from Little, Brown Books (of Hachette Book Group) to the American Red Cross. Congratulations to Stephanie Meyer and the American Red Cross.

You can now read an extract from the title on-line until the 5th of July.

Scholastic Children’s Books announced last week that Australian illustrator Freya Blackwood has won the 2010 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK’s most prestigious children’s illustration award for Harry & Hopper (text by Margaret Wild). The book movingly portrays a young boy, Harry, coming to terms with the sudden death of his much-loved dog, Hopper.

Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal so a big congratulations goes to Freya and Neil!

To find out more about the 2010 CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards click here.

Recently we delivered a CPD on Storyboarding and Filmmaking for primary teachers. You can download both CPD notes and classroom resources for conducting your own in-class storyboarding and film session from our Online Teachers in Residence section.

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