Michael Rosen
When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.Collection: Teacher
I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.Collection: Age
Whether were parents, carers, teachers or anyone working with young children, we know that children move easily and often between free play and structured play. One is not better or worse than another, they each offer different experiences, different ways of thinking, and different kinds of learning.
Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived.
The world of children's books is a very friendly, decent place to be. It's full of people who are desperate to enlighten, interest and excite children in ideas, imaginary worlds and contemporary issues.
The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't.
If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.
I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household where my older brother and my father read out loud to me as a teenager. It was a form of conversation or entertainment.
I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.
We've all been children, we all know a parent or parent-figure. This makes us all potential writers of children's books.
My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.
Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.
Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through 'synthetic phonics' and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.
The first pages of any book I remember reading, in Pinner Wood primary school, were from The Beacon Readers: stories of Farmer Giles, Rover the Dog, Old Lob the shepherd and Mrs Cuddy the Cow. I was very fond of Mrs Cuddy.
The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.
Books for children get into schools. Committed teachers use books like mine alongside films, non-fiction and fiction to help children investigate and understand the Holocaust, persecution and genocide.
Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.
Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.
My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.
At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.
I love rereading Shakespeare plays and Im constantly finding bits that Ive overlooked or not understood before.
Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment.
Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.
I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.
You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.
The word 'family' has always posed great difficulties. Until recently, high death rates for women in labour meant many stepmothers and, according to folklore, most of them wicked. After two world wars, we lost many fathers, and single- and step-parenting emerged from the rubble.
It seems that 17% of men born since 1970 are step-fathers. Of course it is not new: my father's cousin, nearly 96, stepfathered two, while his wife stepmothered one. My own father, 85, has stepfathered three and I, at 58, have stepfathered two. What is new is that stepfathering is climbing fast.
On the rare occasions that men talk to each other about these things, we discover that step-fathering a child whose father has died is very different again from the experience of trying to do it with a child whose father is alive but not on the scene, and that is different from the situation where the biological father is around sometimes.
You can give up the best years of your life knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it, your step-child may not love you or want or need to have anything to do with you once they have left home.
The walk between our house and the bus stop is marked by decay and wreckage. A row of shops, flats, community centres and an old cinema is boarded up, burned out, cracking and rotting.
I've seen after-school clubs where parents, teachers and children have got together to write books. They were in a mix of languages; the books told stories of what the parents got up to when they were children and how they arrived in the area, whether it was from another country or from the other side of town.
If you think you're living in an imperfect world, you can write a book about a better world and hope that enough of your readers will notice the difference between the two.
Lists, and lists of lists, invite many questions and one that crops up here is: what makes a children's book last? When it's books for very young children, this is a matter that is almost entirely at the behest of adults - parents, teachers, critics, librarians.
A visit to a bookshop will be a difficult one if you're looking for any picture book in print that is more than 50 years old.
The wave of feeling that can overcome an adult when he or she opens a book that was read to them by a loved parent or teacher can be quite stunning.
Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.
Poetry on TV doesn't have to be like a newscast with someone staring blankly at the camera, pretending they're not reading from an autocue.
Yes, it's possible to play computer games on your own and many do. But I also see children playing them in pairs and fours for hours on end and the air is full of talk and banter.
I think the best learning takes place when you create an atmosphere of curiosity and excitement.
Poetry has never been written with the intention of making young people irritated, bored, anxious or humiliated, and yet the consequence of the test and exam system often does just that.
There's no one right way to teach poetry in schools.
What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix - yes, some schools junked it - but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when.
When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.
Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn't. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness.
Politicians of all kinds think there's some running in talking tough about children's reading. They think that if they announce to the public that some kind of daily drilling on sounds and letters is to be brought in, the problem of children's reading will be solved.
The main problem with people not reading to their children is the lack of a bridge between schools and families, so that children don't see books and learning as a separate part of life.
People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.
The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people - quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.
Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.
Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.