Red Paper Books

Work­books for Grade 1 (and then Grade 2) cov­er­ing addi­tion & sub­trac­tion, phon­ics, time & money, and vocab­u­lary. They may look sim­ple but they were really fid­dly, exas­per­ated some­what by edi­to­r­ial rewrites in the face of the tight­est sched­ule ever. We worked over much of Christ­mas to get these done. But they were fun, and the artists were both blaz­ingly fast!

Thanks also to Jane Walker at QED for rush­ing me some gratis copies from the US in time for the Lon­don Inter­na­tional Book Fair.

Grade 1 artist: Bill Bolton

Sam­ple pages:

Load­ing Images

Aba­cus Evolve is a ver­sa­tile and cus­tomiz­able maths course pro­duced by Heine­mann. We worked on the inter­ac­tive teach­ing resources, ie. white­board pre­sen­ta­tions. They used Eas­iteach soft­ware from RM (Research Machines) which allowed easy onscreen manip­u­la­tion of objects, draw­ing, writ­ing in front of the whole class on inter­ac­tive white­boards by teacher or pupils. Eas­iteach was pre­ferred over Pow­er­Point because it is so easy for the teacher to adapt on-the-fly in response to the class.

(more…)

Cov­ers and sam­ple spreads from the 2nd stage/level of Oxford Read­ing Tree Snap­drag­ons. We were com­mis­sioned to pro­duce 60 titles, in 10 lev­els or stages, using a wide vari­ety of artists, type­faces, lay­outs and for­mats to moti­vate and stim­u­late read­ers. Though clearly lev­eled to pro­vide a pro­gres­sion through the series, each title had to be an inter­est­ing book to pick-up and read for its own sake.

Artists: Andy Peters, David Mostyn, Jess Mikhail, Judy Brown, Lizzie Fin­lay, Liz Pichon

(more…)

Snap­drag­ons is part of the ever expand­ing Oxford Read­ing Tree (ORT) from Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. Usu­ally ORT book sto­ries cen­tre around the Biff and Chip char­ac­ters, with con­sis­tent art­work and type. Not so the Snap­drag­ons branch of the tree. We were com­mis­sioned to pro­duce 60 titles, in 10 lev­els or stages, using a wide vari­ety of artists, type­faces, lay­outs and for­mats to moti­vate and stim­u­late read­ers. Though clearly lev­eled to pro­vide a pro­gres­sion through the series, each title had to be an inter­est­ing book to pick-up and read for its own sake.

Artists: Jan McCaf­ferty, Sue Hen­dra, Jim Kavanagh, Joanne Par­tis, Ian Cun­liffe, Colin Mier

(more…)

Goal! is a read­ing scheme with a foot­ball theme for less able read­ers want­ing some­thing inter­est­ing to read. These are work­books that accom­pany the series.

A fun take on comic book super-heroes, and a good read too. Orig­i­nally 6, now 12, graphic nov­els done in a manga style. These read­ers are aimed at older chil­dren need­ing help with read­ing who would be put-off by books writ­ten for younger read­ers. Ran­som are par­tic­u­larly good at this sort of stim­u­lat­ing read, as is fur­ther demon­strated by their Goal! series.

The artist is Peter Richard­son. He works in Illus­tra­tor, and his art­work is easy for a designer to work with, as the files are highly editable and adapt­able for con­struct­ing pre­lim and cover pages, as well as being eas­ily uti­lized for par­tic­u­lar excerpts in worbooks.

(more…)

A series of books that Par­ragon pro­duces for M&S that young read­ers read with an adult. They are all very tra­di­tional fairy tales, designed to give chil­dren con­fi­dence to begin read­ing. These are hard­back books with coloured metal­lic foil block­ing in the titles and logo.

(more…)