I am a Dad Writer

I am normally described as a football writer. That's because I write books about football. But books about football are about more than football.

Take Mal Peet. His amazing football book Keeper is about rain forests, magic and ghosts amongst other things.

Take Dan Freedman. His football books are about relationships with girls, relationships with parents, etc.

Take Helena Pielichaty. Her football stories are about healthy eating, bullying, perceptions of foreigners and a hundred other things. As well as football.

Take Bali Rai, Michael Coleman, Alan Gibbons and a dozen others. We have our own obsessions that we pursue in our books just as much as we pursue football.

If you want to know what my biggest obsession is, it could well be dads. Being a dad. Being a son of dads.

I am a Dad writer as well as a football writer.

I had three dads.

I was adopted. My next mum and dad split up when I was four. Then, the dad who brought me up died when I was 21. That has made me think a lot about fatherhood. That all came to a head when I became a dad seven years ago. What sort of a dad should I be? Number one, two or three?

That was the time I started writing for children too.

My first book - Foul Play - is about a boy who solves football crimes. Spy and detective kids in books often have dead parents. It helps free them up to detect and spy. But I wanted Danny to have a dad he was really close to.

In Foul Play (and the other four books in the series) Danny reads crime books to his dad, who is blind. That's why Danny is so good at being a detective. He is empowered by the books he reads to his dad. They are close and Danny has to work within his dad's boundaries to solve the football crimes he solves.

In the Football Academy series I have thirteen boys, all with different dad relationships:

Boys United has a dad who backs his son all the way, but picks him up when he makes mistakes.

Striking Out has a dad that wants his son to give up football and concentrate on his schooling.

The Real Thing has a Polish boy and his dad, struggling with the bullying that the boy gets because of his accent and background.

Reading the Game is about a boy whose dad left when he was a baby and he's never seen him and he's not sure how to grow up.

Free Kick is about a boy whose dad wants him to be a chip off the old block, but the boy doesn't want that.

Captain Fantastic is about a boy who has a secret: his dad is in prison.

I am a football writer. But I am a dad writer too.

On Monday a lad came up to me at a school in Hull. He said his dad was in prison. He said he'd read Captain Fantastic. He said he liked it.

Summer Reading Challenge 2011

The Summer Reading Challenge is about to launch for 2011.

This year the theme is Circus Stars.

My daughter has already spent ages on the website making her personalised character and watching author videos.

I love the Summer Reading Challenge. It gets children into libraries. It reminds me that going to libraries changed my life in several ways.

Here's how:

One: when I got interested in reading about football, they had books about how to play, histories of teams, biographies of players and stories that my mum borrowed for me.

Two: when I was a more confident reader, they were there with books on all the things I wanted to find out about, like Hitler, body language, Dadaism, world religions, European travel, the pyramids, etc, etc, etc.

Three: when my dad was dying and I needed somewhere to go and clear my head away from home, I went to the library. It was my escape.

Four: when I was there one day I found, by chance, a rack of university prospectuses and one course about Modern European Literature that inspired me to take A levels and dream of doing a degree, aged 23, which I did.

Five: when I needed to study in Leeds - even though my degree was in Reading, 200 miles away - because my mum was dying and I had to be near her, I was able to get all the books I needed for the course in Lededs reference library.

Six: when I started writing I needed facts and ideas to write about. I got them at the library.

Seven: when we wanted to get our daughter into books and she wanted to read dozens of books a month, we went to the library.

I could go on.

Getting children into libraries to do the Summer Reading Challenge will create the opportunities for them that libraries created for me.

Check out the website at http://www.circus-stars.org.uk/. There's even a video of me filmed by my daughter, talking about what she likes to read.

Writing for boys - with the P.E. department

I joined in a great event yesterday at Ellis Guildford School in Nottingham. The idea was to blend a P.E. lesson with writing activities.

It lasted one hour. The boys were put in teams of five. The P.E. teacher did two ten-minute activities. I did two ten-minute exercises. After each activity the teams were awarded points, which accumulated during the session.

It looked something like this:

1: The teams had to bowl a cricket ball at a set of stumps. Each time they hit the stumps they were given a letter from a football team's name. The first team to guess the team won.

2: I challenged the kids to make up a story by (a) basing a baddie on someone they hated from sport and (b) asking the following questions: who is the baddie, what did they do, where, when, how did they do it and why did they do it. They then 'told' their story and were awarded points by me and the teacher.

3: Relay races. Points awarded for placing.

4: The groups read a one-page cricket mystery I have written. They had to guess who had stolen the Ashes trophy as a team and write an ending. They were then awarded points.

The whole hour was frantic, competitive and often confusing. But it worked. The children carried through the adrenaline of the sports activities into the writing. And that was the idea. To give them a deep motivation to write.

The prize for the winners was a book and a £10 WHSmith voucher each. We had a good budget. But, to be honest, they'd have done it without a there being a prize at all.

A Question of Sport

I went to a great event tonight at Heathfield Primary School in Nottingham. I thought I'd share it.

The idea was to recreate the Question of Sport TV show in the classroom. For families.

There were nine men there. Dads, step-dads and grandads. each headed up a team of their kids in a pub quiz style event.

That was what impressed me so much. Getting dads to come to after-school events is not always easy.

The head teacher and another senior teacher led a series of rounds around general knowledge, what happened next and a session where I asked questions about my books. The families accumulated points for getting questions right.

It worked really well. We talked about sport and reading for an hour-and-a-half. Kids working with adults.

Family events like this work so well because they take the idea of talking about reading home with them. And everbody knows that strong readers are mostly inspired by their home experience.

If you want to do a Question of Sport event, here are some ideas:

* invite parents, especially dads, to a sports pub quiz style event

* do it like a pub quiz - and serve beer (to the adults!)

* the picture board round: show pictures of sports people from the cover of their biographies (concealing their names on the cover) - ask them who it is

* what happened next: show sports incidents selected from YouTube, stopping them before a key moment; then ask the audience to guess what happens next

* show sports newspaper headlines with words blacked out - and ask the families to guess the missing words

* read a section from some sports autobiographies and ask the audience to guess who it is by

* add a general knowedge round

* invite an author to come and add to the quiz activity

These are just a few ideas. It worked really well at Heathfield.

Getting past page 100

The article on the BBC website about boys struggling to get past page 100 in a book brought back a lot of memories for me.

In a survey of 500 teachers, 70% said boys struggled to reach page 100.

I got into reading aged 18. I was unemployed. Mid 1980s. I would sit in the front room at home trying to read.

I had this trick to help me. Every 10 pages I would cheer under my breath. If I made it to page 100 I would feel elated. This was even the case with books I loved. The cheering helped me motivate myself. It gave me stamina.

The article mentions 'stamina'. That is spot on for me. Having the stamina to get to page 100. When I do school events, I say that to the children. I didn't have the stamina. I compare it to footballers, who need to build up their stamina at the beginning of the season. They have to try to get match fit, but that the rewards are great. Just like with reading.

If I didn't make it to page 100 - and I didn't often early on - I would feel like I had failed. Failed to finish a book. I never tried to read a book over 150 pages. Not until I was 20. It was too much. Too much of a chance of failing.

Take a look at some of the booklists on http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/ : lots of short books that might not make boys feel like failures.

Engage with some of their projects: projects that give boys new ways to maintain their stamina.

Lobby important people about the work the National Literacy Trust do.

I ought to admit that I still cheer myself when I'm reading. Even though I'm 43. When I hit page 100 in a book. That's why the story hit home for me.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13393321

Postcards

National Literacy Trust

I am doing a new blog for the National Literacy Trust.

The plan is for me to blog once a week as I write my Squad series for Puffin.

Each week I will write about a different aspect of writing that I've been challenged by that week.

In addition there will be an exercise for school classes to do, if they want.

NLT blog

Please let me know what you think of it - and where I could take it.

Football Writers

I have been working with a group of children called the Football Writers since September. They go to Ghyllgrove Junior School in Basildon.

All year - supported by their amazing teacher, Mrs Baker (left) - they have been working on a trailer for my new book, Own Goal.



This is it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmgBfbdwlY


I am absolutely thrilled with it. I hope you like it too.

They started by reading the book. Then they storyboarded it. Then they looked at other trailers for books.

Once they had shared the jobs of actors, directors, designers, etc., they set to work.

I am really proud of what they achieved. We took them to a cinema in Basildon and screened it there, so they could see it on a big screen.

Choosing Chocolate

When I was researching Off Side, I went to visit a fair trade community in Ghana. Part of the story was about a boy whose family were being cheated and not paid a fair rate for their cocoa beans.

One day I found myself in a school deep inside Ghana. The kids there asked me to sing some English football songs. I gave them a bit of Marching On Together and some other numbers. They wanted to know about England, about my books, about football and about my daughter,

The school had been paid for by a dividend that Divine chocolate pay the farmers to help them build schools and medical facilities. They had decent houses too. Thanks to being paid fairtrade prices.

The dividend Divine pays them means that Divine and other fairtrade chocolate costs us a few pence more. It doesn't make that much diference to most of us. But it does to them.

Please - if you're buying Easter eggs, etc. this week - consider buying Fair Trade. You'll be changing lives. I've seen it in action.