By For World Book Day 2025, Jason spent the morning at Our Lady of Lourdes primary school in Finchley in North London.
He started with a session on his early years rhyming book What Can You See? for children from Reception and Year 1, reading the book, encouraging them to guess the rhymes and inviting them to have a go at the activity sheet associated with the book.
For the more advanced children in the group, he also gave them a sneak preview of his anarchic rhyming book, I Like To Put Food In My Welly, enough to explain the title and to show them how much fun you can have by getting your words mixed up.
Next, he read A Zoo In My Shoe to Year 2 and Year 3 children, who anticipated the nonsense to come and laughed in all the right places. Without wanting to get on the wrong side of one of the teachers, he recalled a time when a teacher had told a group of children to stop laughing so that he could continue reading. They were meant to be laughing, he reassured them – but they also had to be quiet enough to hear the next bit to laugh at.
With the group enthusiastically getting into the spirit of the book, he invited the children to help him with some rhymes to write what would amount to another chapter of the book. Looking around the school hall, he pointed to a goal, and the children shouted in unison, “Bowl, coal, pole, hole.”
Before long, they’d come up three sentences and had more fun mixing up the endings, having Ronaldo kicking a ball into a bowl, children eating cereal from a hole and a mouse living in a goal.
The children then had more fun drawing the animals they’d like to keep in their shoes.
“It’s my first reading event this year, so I was worried I might be rusty,” noted Jason, “But some of these kids were really engaged, on the button and sharper than me. I was also gratified to hear that some of the classes continued doing activities based on the books after well into the afternoon, after I’d left,” he added.
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