Michael Rosen

Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds.

My father was adept at making up limericks about place names we encountered on holidays or others using the names of new people we met.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

Cricket is great for families, so long as you don't play by the proper rules and adapt it so the youngest can be helped to stay doing the exciting stuff.

Change in language is hard to capture and when it's visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept.

The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure.

Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived.

The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't.

When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened.

The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.

Across the many years I've been involved with arts education, I have seen countless projects, schemes, partnerships and programmes, on and off site, being developed, flowering and then getting phased out.

My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools.

If schools don't make books important then children who come from homes with no books, and who don't visit libraries, will never find their way into this vital way of presenting ideas, feelings and knowledge.

Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.

The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience.

The whole of Sheffield seems to be crazy about books. There are festivals and their own book awards, and their own children's book conferences for teachers and librarians.

In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases where only one copy of the work exists the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated.

What's difficult to do in books for children is to create funny incidents. Funny images, funny language and any kind of taboo-breaking is not difficult.

Any child who reads widely, often and for pleasure will inevitably make comparisons between what they're reading, why they're reading and how they're reading.

I can't think of how many meetings I've sat through where people have explained that language has become less important because we now live in a visual age.

Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.

Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people's speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire.

I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.

We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often - in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion.

A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.

The way we speak is very different from the way we write - especially from the way we write continuous prose.

One of the reasons we invented continuous prose was to lay out an argument, piling points on top of each other, weighing one view against another, even to invite the reader to look back at something earlier or later in a book.

In his 70s, when I was in my 40s, my father still read me the stories he wrote about his childhood. His intonation, his pronunciation of Yiddish, our cackling at his jokes live on.

I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household where my older brother and my father read out loud to me as a teenager. It was a form of conversation or entertainment.

Its social: in doing the arts we find out what we need from each other. But its also about survival - surviving as individuals, as groups, but also as the human race.

The arts investigate the properties of the world by playing with materials - such as stone, paint, fabric, synthetic substances, the human body, the human voice and of course language.

There should be room in education for schooling to be more responsive to events, more focused on varying interpretations and more able to create artistic and technological responses to the world as it changes.

The world is becoming increasingly changeable and unpredictable, so why should education make the knowledge being passed on so finite and certain; why divide all of it into measurable units?

Im generally of the view that we should know the names of those who enacted and justified imperial power - but only if the glorifying can be supplemented with plaques that tell us the shameful histories of, for example active participation in the slave trade or highly successful and profitable lives extracted from slave plantations.

When it comes to the UK, our problem is that weve never decolonised.

When territories were settled or invaded by force, the colonisers frequently used names of European monarchs, leaders and the military as part of their settlement. The number of Victorias all over the world are one testimony to that.

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

Any encounter, any situation in which there was a confrontation between us as children and our own parents, or teachers, when we did something daft, can arouse amazement and delight in our children. Theres something wonderful about knowing that our own parents were fallible.

As I began to perform - songs, poems, sketches or conjuring tricks - I began to learn what children run with and what they dont. I discovered that, quite often, an element of surprise or absurdity might be the key to unlocking laughter.

If you want to discover how to make children laugh - and I truly believe all adults should, because children need laughter - the best place to start is with your own childhood.

One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels.

Academies can also flog off land and buildings, if the much weakened local authorities agree. Serious money can be made, management salaries are high, and hidden in all this is the long-term public subsidy in such sites.

The sentimentalist in me loves it when the important things we say and do can be tied to buildings and landscape.

In the mid-1970s I worked at Vauxhall Manor school, a girls comprehensive in south London.

I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.

A society based on a market economy which decided that people should only be allowed to take up senior positions in business, administration and the professions purely on merit would have to abolish the main mechanisms for taking up the top positions in society: inherited wealth, tax havens and private education.

We have an almost complete comprehensive primary school system in England. Surely, if grammar schools are some kind of answer to making education better for children over the age of 11, it would be the answer for children under the age of 11.

Education is all about making sure that the next generation know what our representatives think they should know.