Millbank Primary School
Growing Together To Be Our Best
Roald Dahl Stamps
We love books especially by Roald Dahl, with his fun children friendly stories and of course the beautiful illustrations by Quentin Blake too. So we were happy to help launch a new set of stamps by the Royal Mail to honour the author.
It was the first full week back after our Christmas Holidays and we were invited to dress up as our favourite character from any of Dahl's books. Some of the costumes were great and you could tell a lot of thought and effort had gone into them.
Tim was the professional photographer who came along and took lots of photos of us. We saw how he posed the shots and took lots of photos untill he was sure he had the right one. He used lots of lighting- even outside! But more than anything we could see that he thought about the best shots for his client the Royal Mail. They wanted a nice shot of the stamps for the Echo, so the stamps had to be more prominent than all the children.
We went outside to have the photos during assembly but came back in at the end to show the rest of the school our lovely outfits, and talk about our favourite books and why we liked them.
Some of the children had obviously been paying attention to Tim's work and took some nice shots themselves. A big well done to them and to everyone who took part. The Royal Mail kindly gave 4 presentation packs including the sets of stamps valued at £8.10 each to share out amongst the children who had taken part. Like all the amazing stamps produced these will make a great keepsake.
You can find out more information about Dahl at the official website. Mrs C Brown's class 2 is of course also known as dosbarth Roald Dahl.
You can see some of us watching the movie of the Fantastic Fox at the relaunch of theChapter Arts in November 2009. there are lots of ways that we try and encourage literacy at the school. Every week we have a book of the week which we also try and fit in our weekly newsletter, and lots of fun initiatives and competitions.Article 17c of the UNCRC says that states should "Encourage the production and dissemination of children's books. " and you could say that the stamps are part of 17a which is that states should ... "Encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child and in accordance with the spirit of article 29." Whilst the Royal Mail is not the mass media the stamps are lovely and the packs contain lots of lovely information too.
You can see the story of the stamp launch covered on the BBC's Newsround and the young peoples newspaper 'First News.' Sadly we have not seen our photos and the story covered in the local press yet. You can see the Guardian Newspapers story here. You can see the Royal Mails webpage of the launch here.
