Year 5 - Michael Morpurgo live!

This week, Year 5 were very excited to have a virtual visit from children’s author, Michael Morpurgo. In the Spring term, we read Kensuke’s Kingdom as our class novel and we enjoyed it so much that we entered a competition where we had to read and review one of his books. The children worked very hard and were delighted to find out that we had won.

Michael Morpurgo has written over 130 books and the children were interested to pick up some tips on how to become a successful author. Michael started by telling us about his early life when he was growing up just after the end of the war. He explained that the atmosphere of sadness and loss at this time influenced his writing as he often writes about war and reconciliation.

The children had lots of questions to ask him and were surprised to find out that he doesn’t often read books as he gets cross when they are not very good and gets cross when they are very good as he wishes that he had written them himself! The children were interested to find out that some of the animal characters in his books are based on his pets and the animals on his farm and that if he could be any character from his book, he would be Kensuke. Most importantly he told us to never give up on a story and to ‘dream’ it right to the end before you start to write. Hopefully his inspiring talk will have encouraged some of our own budding authors to pick up a pen!