Kids Blog

Kate and her mum Catherine receive their Books to Babies prize from Jane Hill.

What’s Books to Babies? To find out more visit our services page.

The word “pirate” means “one who plunders on the sea.” But there were also different types of pirate:

• Privateers, or “private men of war” were sea-raiders with a government licence to pillage enemy ships.
• Buccaneers were 17th century pirates who menaced the Spanish in the Caribbean.
• Corsairs were both privateers and pirates who roamed the Mediterranean.
• Barbary corsairs were Muslims who came from the southern coast of the Mediterranean.

Men were lured into the life of a pirate by the desire for riches, pleasure, freedom and power. Read this book for more info.

I found this awesome book on Paper Folding in the library today. There are some neat ideas for gifts like a box you can fill with chocolate or a photo frame for your favourite photo. You can also make paper bangers to scare your friends, or how about a water bomb for those hot summer days? Lots of great ideas to keep you entertained.

Psst! It’s true! There are bugs in your bed. Blood-sucking vampires, deadly dust-dwellers, toilet terrors and things that squish, squirm and slime. Did you have any idea you were sharing your house – and maybe your bed – with monsters? In this book by Heather Catchpole and Vanessa Woods you’ll meet a hideous creature that can live for a month without its head, a beetle that blasts its victims with toxic bottom spray, weird beings that breathe through their skin, five-eyed monsters that vomit on their prey to turn them into soup, and much, much more!

Are you a Cornelia Funke fan? Have you read the other Ink… books and are you waiting eagerly for the next instalment? Well make sure you reserve your copy of Inkdeath now! If you are a fan we’d love to hear what you think of the books.

Wow! (the visual encyclopedia of everything) is a brand new book which will hook you with page after page of great photographic images. This is not your ordinary encyclopedia although there are the usual topics such as nature, space , the human body…

Hey check out this great new book: Gold of the Gods by Bear Grylls. Beck Granger is facing certain death. He’s lost in the Colombian jungle with no GPS, no food, and no help but for two friends, with only a tattered map and a strange amulet guiding their way. But he has his survival skills, and if anyone can keep them alive, Beck can. He’s great at building rafts and shelter, killing snakes, finding water… and fending of shark attacks. He knows how to navigate any environment, but even he can’t anticipate every danger……

Here’s you chance to try your hand at being an author. Choose between a fairy, horror or space story. You get to pick the characters and all the exciting bits of the story and the website will spin it all together and come up with your very own tale! Its fun, and often funny, and there are loads of different stories to make!

You can find the website here- http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-writing-storymaker.htm 

Hi Guys,

I’ve just finished reading a great book called The dog that dumped on my doona by Barry Jonsberg. It’s about a boy called Marcus who wakes one night to find an ugly, dirty, smelly white dog (Blacky) has left something unpleasant on his doona (Australian for duvet). Can you guess what it is?  As you can imagine, Marcus is not too happy about this but things get complicated when Marcus realises that he can hear the dog speak, and what’s more, Blacky has a mission for Marcus. He must save a species from extinction. This is a great book with lots of laughs as Marcus attempts to complete his mission.  Check it out.

From the It’s True series comes You Can Make Your Own Jokes. It’s a wacky book that gives you tips on how to free the knock knocker or joker in you. It will cure you of making BAD jokes and punchlines that aren’t really punchy. It’s sort of like an instruction manual that will help you along as you make your journey into joketown. Start a laughter epidemic or pester all the people you know with your perfect punchlines.  Try it why doncha!