A Jolly Booktastic Outing to London's 'Discover Story' venue with an awesome group of bloggers to see the truly brilliant Alex T. Smith

Too quick for the camera! Charlotte and her new friends loving Discover Story's 'Noisy room'

The Venue: 

Discover Story

The Awesome Bloggers: 

Zoe and her children from "Playing By The Book"

Helen and her children from "CApptivated Kids"

Polly and her children from "The Little Wooden Horse"

The awesome Elli from "Taking Words for a Stroll"

Oh and us, ReadItDaddy and "The Strolling Mum"

With superstar guest Alex T Smith!

After a crack-o-dawn start, team ReadItDaddy bumped on a very bumpy bus to That There London and to Stratford to meet the others. Amazingly, with good fortune (and some rather good spotting from Ali, the strolling mum) we all met up as intended and after a spot of lunch, headed off to Discover Story.

At the moment, this imaginative booktastic venue is space themed, but first we thought we'd explore upstairs and check out the various cool areas to play and run around in (and boy, can those kids run around - faster than my camera could track them anyway!)

Soon we headed downstairs into Discover's fabulous "Space Zone" for a journey to the stars. The kids loved donning their special space jackets, and exploring the alien planets and craters of the zone before taking part in a more interactive 'workshop' (with lots of blasting off and counting down!)

Charlotte discovers a groovy little robot chum in the Space Zone. 

We were also at Discover on a special mission, to see a living legend in children's books in action.

Alex T Smith, creator of the fabulous "Claude" series of children's books gave a special talk and also let us into a few rather brilliant secrets (in particular, a sneaky peek at Claude 6 - "Claude Hits the Slopes" which NO ONE ELSE had seen before the day, not even Alex's own nephews!)

Alex T Smith showing us how to spot a sneaky ghost!

It was a brilliant talk, with Alex showing the gathered children how to draw Claude and become illustrators themselves (adults were also invited to take part, and I sneakily drew my Claude with a Tardis on his head as I'm sure this is what his Beret really is!)

Alex also signed our copy of "Claude in the Spotlight" and we even got to meet the REAL Sir Bobblysocks (sadly, missing his fabulous glasses alas).

It was absolutely lovely to meet the other bloggers (I was so nervous I think I babbled and mumbled a lot), and it was really brilliant that all our children had a ton of fun, and got on wonderfully together (listening to their conversations and hearing their fantastic imaginations at play was truly awesome).

So watch out world, we'll definitely be doing it again soon!

The Olympic Park - Just a stone's throw away from Discover Story