Hi, and welcome back to the Sweet Cherry blog!

 Since September, we have been sending the wonderful Danny Dingle’s Fantastic Finds book to schoolchildren across the East Midlands, giving each child an opportunity to discover and read something new. Every school that has expressed interest in the initiative has received a class pack of 28 books, bookmarks, leaflets and review sheets. We are very pleased to report that March will mark the sixth month of this free book initiative – where has the time gone?

 Although we have enjoyed reading feedback from schools, we wanted to do even more. We have always wanted to create something fun but educational for children to enjoy in addition to filling out our review sheets, so after some nail-biting and brainstorming, we came up with Danny Dingle Day!

 Last week, on Thursday 3rd March, which was also World Book Day, we held Danny Dingle Day, our very first creative event. We wanted to share the crazy world of Danny Dingle on one of the best days of the academic and publishing year. We designed a worksheet booklet for the schoolchildren of Nottinghamshire and sent these booklets along with a free class pack of books to schools in the region. Each pupil booklet contained the original review sheet as well as some literacy and art activities that were designed to introduce children to the wacky characters and to encourage them to be inventors for the day. In addition, the teachers of each class also received an informative teacher’s pack, which explained how each activity worked and included suggestions for how to incorporate Danny Dingle into their lesson plan.

 We were delighted to send our packs to 14 schools in the region, some of which will continue to use the packs in class over the course of the month. It was great to see some recreations of the Metal-Mobile from the children at Sleaford Church Lane, and we were particularly thrilled to see a pupil at Bispham Drive School dressed up as Danny Dingle for the day!

 In all, the day was a success, and we hope to plan something similar in the future for more of our titles. Thank you to all the schools who took part, we can’t wait to see what else you come up with in the weeks to come!

If would like to know more about our school initiative, you can click here.