A cracking and fast paced adventure story with a solid anti-bullying message. "Superbot and the Terrible Toy Destroyer" is here to save the day!

"Claude on Holiday" by Alex T. Smith (Hodder Childrens Books)

Welcome to our March edition rounding up some of the amazing and awesome chapter books and early chapter readers we've been casting our eyes across over the last few weeks. And we're starting off with a long-time blog favourite penned by an awesome booktastic chap! Alex T. Smith's "Claude" series has been a favourite of Charlotte's for quite some time now and she constantly talks about the time she met Alex and got her copy of "Claude in the Spotlight" signed.

We've been catching up with the series courtesy of Hodder and join Claude on Holiday and Claude in the City in two further adventures, accompanied by his Tardis-like beret and his ever-faithful and dapper companion Sir Bobblysock.

In "Claude on Holiday" Claude and Sir Bobblysock are off for some desperately needed R & R to a lovely seaside resort. Strictly no adventures and no crazy antics, just sun, sea and sandcastles! Of course things don't always go according to plan for Claude and Sir! Excitement and adventure are never far behind, and as Claude settles in for a well earned rest, nefarious ne'er do well pirates seem set to scupper their hols! EGAD! Claude may be a little dog, slightly on the plump side, but he's a brave soul and so dive in to find out whether sharp-witted Claude and Sir Bobblysock can outwit those dimwit salty coves! Yo ho!

"Claude in the City" by Alex T. Smith (Hodder Children's Books)

"Claude in the City" returns Claude to slightly more cosmopolitan climes as Mr and Mrs Shinyshoes disappear to work for the day as usual, leaving Claude and Sir Bobblysock to plan their next grand adventure. Claude rather fancies hitting the town in fine style, visiting the sights, stopping by a cafe for a much needed sticky bun and a cup of Earl Grey but as seasoned Claude fans will know, excitement and adventure are usually around the next corner. There's a terrible robbery in progress and Claude ends up hopelessly mixed up in the caper! Smart doggies like Claude aren't foiled by gruff robbers though so it's time to swing into action!

It's easy to see why Charlotte loves these stories so. Alex has a keen wit (anyone who has ever followed him on Twitter can't help to hoot with laughter at his commentaries on popular TV shows as they air, particularly Downton Abbey!), his illustrations are utterly brilliant and the Claude stories achieve the perfect balance between picture book fun and chapter book depth. We love them to bits!!

Who could possibly follow an act as classy as Claude?

"Matilda" by Roald Dahl (Puffin Books)

Only one of the world's most best loved children's books. Matilda has been around since I was a wee whippersnapper but now Charlotte is getting her teeth into more wordy fare as she reads to herself at bedtime, she's ready to jump headfirst into the amazing book worlds of Roald Dahl. What better place to start than with the story of Matilda, a little girl with a huge intellect and a deep love of books.

Matilda's family don't share her enthusiasm for literature (in fact her parents are downright boorish). Despite this, Matilda finds her way to her local library and falls in love with all the books she finds there, rapidly working her way through the children's section before discovering the delights of The Secret Garden and Charles Dickens!

Matilda's rotten parents eventually send her off to school, and she meets the wonderful Miss Honey - a big hearted teacher who realises Matilda's potential, and also shares her love of books. Unfortunately the school's headmistress is one of the most terrifying characters ever created in children's literature. The huge, the hulking, the temperamental Miss Trunchbull - Ex-Olympic shot-putter and all round big fat horrendous bully.

Can Matilda's sharp intellect and quick wits help solve a mystery from Miss Honey's past? Will Matilda ever be free of her annoying parents and brother?

You'll have to read on and find out. It was quite something to see three girls in Charlotte's cloakroom at school drop-off all reading their own copy of Matilda the other day, testament to just how brilliant Dahl's books are and this book in particular! What a great place to start a life-long love affair with Mr Dahl's fantastic work!

One more before we go? Oh there's always room for one more....!

"The Secret Kitten" by Holly Webb (Stripes Publishing)

You'll have to wait a couple of weeks till you can enjoy "The Secret Kitten" by Holly Webb, but this is the amazing 30th book (30 BOOKS! 30!) in her wonderful animal stories series. Centred around a young girl named Lucy who goes to live with her Gran, it's a touching tale of a lonely little girl who finds solace in an unexpected friend. Gran doesn't like animals but Lucy can't help but fall in love with an adorable stray kitten she rescues and begins to look after in secret. Will Lucy's annoying brother find out? What will Gran say!

Holly Webb's animal stories are perfect for Charlotte's age group (and like Matilda, we've seen lots of kids toting books from the animal stories series at drop off and pickup times at home). Charlotte read through the story fairly quickly and gave it a huge thumbs up, wanting to track down more of Holly's astonishing collection so we'll be looking out for them very soon! "The Secret Kitten" is out on 6th April 2015 from Stripes (Little Tiger) and you can find out more about Holly's brilliant books on the Little Tiger / Stripes Website.

That's a wrap, tune in next month for more chapter book goodies in April's roundup!

The Love2Read Photo Books are a fab way to encourage children to enjoy reading, where they can be the star!

Our recent holiday to Tenerife was a lot of fun. But like most parents we never seem to get round to printing our holiday photos out - or any photos for that matter, as the world goes digital and we tend to keep all our pics on various digital or cloud sources.

So for once, it was extremely nice to be able to put together something unique and personal that had a dual purpose. Not only offering an attractive little summary of our holiday, but also a great little reading book for Charlotte to enjoy too.

Coming up with the idea of a web-driven book design service that uses various subjects (as you can see from the header image above, books about dad, holidays, friends etc) that can be tailored in a very easy to use online interface, Love2Read lets parents (and children) put together the books, before they're submitted for printing.

You'll get an absolutely BRILLIANT confirmation email back once your book is ready, then it will wing its way to you in the post.

It's a great idea for parents to do these as surprise presents for children or for books that a child can read while staying with grandparents or other family (our holiday one has been a huge hit with our relatives and friends) who can snuggle down with Charlotte and let her read it to them.

As mentioned before, the site is easy to use and you can save your photobook project part way through and come back to it.

The only thing we could mention really is that there's a list of keywords at the back of the book, common phrases that I'm assuming could've been drawn from the book's text but we couldn't see any way to alter this in the online design tools - so when our book turned up it just had the words "Holiday" and "Book" repeated over and over again rather than a list of words we'd come up with ourselves. It seemed to be the only part of the process that needed a tweak.

The results are great though and it's definitely something we'll consider using again for different book subjects or occasions. So whether you're looking for a unique surprise gift for a child just taking their first steps in reading independently, or just want a brilliant memento of an event or to celebrate a family member's birthday this is a really nice little idea.

(We were kindly supplied with a promo code in order to be able to use the Love2Read Service and try it out for ourselves)

Janet and John Books. Yep I am that old, these and the Peter and Jane books were in use at my school when I was Charlotte's age! As Michael Gove once again wades into the fray surrounding early literacy and 'learning to read', with Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson also weighing in with (better informed) opinions, it seems that 2012's favourite literary topic - encouraging and developing a child's reading skills from an early age - isn't going away in 2013.  Rightly so, it's amongst the most important - if not THE most important skill a child begins to learn when they start school, and though most schools adopt the national standards and phonics, and these are fantastically effective tools to aid a child's reading development, I too agree that they should not be the only thing used to encourage a child to read.  Our experience with Charlotte and also shared experiences we hear from other parents suggest that children often feel completely overwhelmed by the options on offer, to the point where different phonics standards, different methods of teaching non-phonic (tricky) words and of course the gigantic differences in reading 'ages' for children all stack up and do more harm than good.  The problem seems to be that the government (and to a certain extent most parents) want a 'magic bullet' - a quick-fire method of turning a child who can't read into one that is fully literate, can read confidently on their own and can start to further develop their literacy skills through a standard set of books neatly pigeonholed into a recommended reading / book list in the shortest time possible.  Our recent experience from Charlotte starting school has taught us that children have such a gigantic amount of information to soak up on a daily basis that when they do have 5 minutes to spare, the very last thing they want to do is sit down with a great story book and read because they can't differentiate between reading for pleasure and reading as a class exercise ('work'). This is something that Michael Rosen has expressed concerns about and it's very easy to see why. I partially agree with his view that parrot-fashion phonics learning can turn kids off wanting to actually read stories for the sheer joy of it, and it could merely be because repetition, recognition and 'breaking down' of words are too disjointed  and completely alien to the 'flow' of the way we read stories.  Julia Donaldson's recent views on how children can gain more benefit from 'acting out' stories while learning to read are absolutely spot on. There's a level of engagement required there, and a class full of children assuming a role and being encouraged to read it are instantly transformed into a brilliant 'team' who, with the right help and cues, can better memorise the words in a story as well as the overall story itself.  We have found the Oxford Learning Tree books to be quite engaging and useful, but again quite often we actually see better results in more traditional 'picture' story books when Charlotte is encouraged to read words aloud in the context of those stories. For obvious reasons, most phonics and learning books are kept short, often fairly lightweight in plot and character development, and fit structured patterns of recognition, staged learning and repetition / decoding that perhaps help a teacher track a child's understanding and ability to deal with that stage or level of reading learning but probably don't offer much beyond this. It's like trying to ascertain whether someone's a great driver by getting them to drive 10ft on a variety of surfaces before rubber-stamping them as a qualified driver, and sending them out on a long road trip across the country.  We obviously don't have a magic bullet any more than anyone else, but we've found that there is little or perhaps even no worth in just relying on the structured and phonics methods of encouraging Charlotte to read. If you do not supplement this type of reading with more traditional methods of reading stories (aloud, together and even letting a child have a go on their own) then they're going to miss probably the most important reason to learn to read in the first place - because it's a massive amount of fun and can open the doors of your imagination in ways nothing else can.