The Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour with Dekko Comics
This year, Scottish Book Trust is bringing literacy, art and numeracy together with Rossie Stone of Dekko Comics who creates comic books to explore maths through illustration.
Tom and Fraser from Scottish Book Trust spoke to us about the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book tour and working with Dekko Comics:
“We are Tom and Fraser from Scottish Book Trust and we have a very strange job indeed. We take world-renowned authors, illustrators, poets and loads of other creative people, and we bundle them into a car (with their permission) and visit schools and event spaces all over Scotland and the rest of the UK. The Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour has visited over 100,000 school pupils over the past 20 years!
An author event is a very powerful way to inspire and excite young people about the benefits of reading and writing for pleasure which we believe has the power to transform lives, from supporting mental health and wellbeing to breaking the poverty cycle, improving employability and inspiring creativity.
Young people get the chance to meet real-life authors, who seem to only exist on book sleeves, and they get the chance to ask questions and get advice and tips from authors at the top of their game.
With COVID-19 we’ve had to change the way we do things a bit. We still visit schools, but now we do it on a big screen thanks to the wonders of technology.
This new reality has got us thinking differently. Not only about how we continue to offer great experiences for young people, but what we offer. When we saw the incredible work being done in schools by Dekko Comics we knew we wanted to work with them to bring an exciting comic and maths-inspired event into schools and who better to partner with than Maths Week Scotland?
“Maths is important right? So why not make it as fun as it is valuable. That’s what we explore in our workshops.”
– Rossie Stone
Rossie’s workshop is aimed at P5-S1 audience and will benefit anyone who has struggled with schoolwork. Rossie has developed a genuinely fun way to learn and once you’ve heard Rossie’s story you will learn how you can do it too.”
Here’s Rossie telling us his story and giving some examples of how you can use drawing to help practice your maths skills:
We love a good dice game! If you travel with some dice in your pocket, you'll never be bored, there's so much you can do with them. Today's game Threes Away requires five dice - you'll also need to think strategically, and it encourages number recognition too.
