Sharing a Shell

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Choose one of the animals in the story and find out about it. Can you write a report about where it lives, what it eats, how it might defend itself etc.? 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. Sharing a Shell is a charming underwater tale of friendship and fun from the stellar picture book partnership of Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks, creators of What the Ladybird Heard. With brilliant rhythmic verse, bright and distinctive illustrations, this is a firm favourite with children and parents alike.

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. 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.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. The illustrations are bright and eye catching for the children and they loved the glittery look and feel to the pictures. It was nice to have a story based underwater for a change and good for them to learn about what crabs two friends are as not all of the children had seen that type from creature before.

With her 2004 picture book Sharing a Shell British children's author Julia Donaldson has a hermit crab busily searching on the beach and in tidal pools for a new home as his/her older abode is no longer big enough. And upon finding a new and suitably spacious shell in which to live, a sea anemone comes along and asks to share the hermit crab's new place of residence with the promise to protect the crab (and of course also the shell) from predators, and then a passing bristleworm also asks, offering to keep the shell clean ad tidy in return (and with the crab quite readily agreeing to basically having two permanent roommates). But after a period of time a bigger shell is once again needed, and while at first the hermit carb, sea anemone and bristleworm squabble amongst themselves and end up going their separate ways, at the end of Sharing a Shell, the bristleworm finds a new and larger shell, and crab, sea anemone and bristleworm once again move in together. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. I struggled with the word "anemone" a tongue twister for me but he was called the purple blob so made life easier for me. The book explores friendships and relationships, of how the characters can co-operate with each other to make a lovely place to live even though they are not the same species. This can be expanded upon to explore the different communities children live in and how/if they work to make a nice environment to live in. Sharing a Shell also highlights the importance of each character, as without each other they are lonely and the shell will be dirty, at risk and unable to move around. Children can then expand on this to see what jobs there are within the UK and the World over and how they assist the people who live there. Violent cannibalistic adventure featuring three rootless wanderers drifting from one temporary abode to another, constantly menaced by vast predatory monsters.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. Look at the use of punctuation in the story. When have full stops, commas, questions marks, exclamation marks (etc.) been used and why? Create some puppets of the crab, anemone and bristle worm. Could you use these to perform the story to an audience? Former Children's Laureate Julia Donaldson is basically the goddess of wordsmithery, as far as I can tell. She's most famous for creating The Gruffalo with Axel Scheffler but has also written about a billion Oxford Learning Tree early readers and a number of lovely books with illustrator Lydia Monks. 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).