The Wizards of Once: Book 1

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Explore our special historic places this Halloween on our brand-new adventure trails. Will you find the ingredients for the Spell to get rid of Witches and uncover the location of the Cup of Second Chances? Common Sense is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of all kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century. But he's not afraid of the spell at all. In fact, he wants them to come... and that is not a good sign! Xar's little companion Squeezjoos is in terrible danger and badly needs saving. Oh, it’s such a lovely thing. I’m really hoping that it will do for children what going to these places did for me, which is to spark their imagination and get them thinking about writing their own stories about these places. I hope that it will bring everything alive for children.

Armistice Day: A Collection of Remembrance - Spark Interest and Educate Children about Historical Moments My top writing tip would be to read lots, to give you a feel for the way different stories can be told. Also practise writing as much as you can – write, and re-write – don’t worry if you don’t finish a story, as long as you are practising, that’s what matters. Also don’t worry if your stories aren’t very long: I didn’t start out writing books as long as the ones I write now. Often kids say to be that they aren’t very good at writing, but I know that’s not true – what they’re struggling with is the mechanics of getting the words onto paper. If you can make up a game in the playground, or you tell your friends stories, you can be an author! Get an adult to write or type for you, if you need to. Oh I love all of these different time periods. I am very drawn to the distant past, partly because when it’s the dark ages I can make up what we don’t know! There’s so much that we don’t know and I find that astonishingly exciting.Wish– A girl from the Warrior tribe and the seventh daughter of Sychorax, Queen of Warriors. Wish is curious, kind and –unlike other Warriors – not opposed to Magic.

Cowell attended Keble College, Oxford where she studied English, and she also attended Saint Martin's School of Art and Brighton University where she learned illustration. She studied at Marlborough College [8] [9] 1982–84. [10] Cressida Cowell | World Book Day". Archived from the original on 21 December 2013 . Retrieved 21 July 2013. Who do you think is narrating the story? Why do you think the author gives us hints about the narrator's identity but never actually reveals it? Xar– A boy from the Wizard tribe. Youngest son of Encanzo the Enchanter, King of Wizards, Xar is rebellious, brave, has a heart of gold and is determined to prove himself.

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Cressida Cowell MBE FRSL (born 15 April 1966) [1] is a British children's author, popularly known for the book series, How to Train Your Dragon, which has subsequently become an award-winning franchise as adapted for the screen by DreamWorks Animation. [2] As of 2015, the series has sold more than seven million copies around the world. [3] In your Wizards of Once book series, you have warriors, wizards and witches. What, to you, is the difference between a wizard and a witch?

I always begin my stories with a map of my imaginary place. Lots of other authors have done the same – Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of Treasure Island before starting to write. This is a really easy way of thinking about characters and setting. Wish is a girl from a warrior tribe and Xar is a boy from a wizard tribe, living in a world loosely based on Ancient Britain at the beginning of the Iron Age. Families can talk about the family relationships in The Wizards of Once. How do Xar and Wish feel about their dad and mom? Do your parents ever expect you to be or do something you're not able to? Children's author Cressida Cowell scoops philosophers' award for fight against stupidity". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 June 2017. Thank you, Miss McDonald! She was my history teacher in upper 4M and she set me a history essay task which was ‘imagine you see Vikings on the horizon’. I wrote a whole creative writing essay in my history lesson!

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How to Train Your Pupils - Tes meets Cressida Cowell | Tes Magazine". www.tes.com . Retrieved 15 January 2023. The Wizards of Once books were inspired really by Sussex, near to where my grandmother grew up. I spent a lot of time there as a child and there were some incredible woods, including one of the oldest new forests in Europe called Kingley Vale where some of the trees are over 2000 years old. It’s pretty spooky! There are lots of wonderful stories about how on certain nights the trees would run red with blood because of the Viking ghosts. So it was partly the wild woods that inspired Wizards of Once. Without ever losing the qualities that have made her books so deservedly popular, very gently (and cleverly) Cressida Cowell leads her young readers into something deeper, something richer, something even more magical. In doing so, her contribution to children's literature follows exactly the same path. She is a true hero of current children's fiction. Her books are a gift and children, parents, carers, and teachers should all be deeply grateful for it. * Magic Fiction Since Potter * We do have Viking literature, which I love. I read a lot of the Viking sagas when I was at university. I love that history, about which we know some but there’s a lot that we don’t know… it’s very fragmentary. I love the dark, dark history where we know nothing except a few vanishing footprints. They are being hunted right across the Wildwoods by fellow Warriors, Wizards and, worst of all, Witches. Oh no! Wish and Xar’s quest to find the ingredients for the Spell to Get Rid of Witches will be terrifying and treacherous, and somebody close will even betray them! But can they outwit the evil Kingwitch before it’s too late, and before everything they hold dear is destroyed?

Exciting and thrilling with lots if action. Some of the characters are really funny and have lots of crazy ideas. . . like Zar trying to catch a witch. When Cressida wasn’t on the island, she was going to school at Marlborough College in Wiltshire where she met and became close friends with Lauren Child, a fellow author/illustrator and the creator of TV’s Charlie and Lola. Cressida and Lauren remain close friends. Indeed Lauren is godmother to Cressida’s daughter Clemmie. The first volume of a new series by author and illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series is an event....Funny, thoughtful and surprisingly wise and lively, this is another coup from Cowell The Sunday Times Fans of How To Train Your Dragon who have been waiting for Cressida Cowell's new series will not be disappointed. Wizards, warriors, magic and two fab new mini heroes. * Weekly Scoop *I do a lot of research into real things to make you think that the imaginary things are true. That goes for the drawings as well as the plots and the stories. I’ll discover that Vikings discovered America way before Christopher Columbus. And so I’ll think ‘oh, that’s very interesting. Maybe I can make Hiccup (from How to Train Your Dragon) go to America?’ Cressida Cowell is the number one bestselling author-illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon and The Wizards of Once book series. How to Train Your Dragon is also an award-winning DreamWorks film franchise. Cressida is an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust, a trustee for World Book Day and a founder patron of the Children's Media Foundation. She lives in Hammersmith with her husband, three children and a dog called Pigeon. Cressida was our Writer in Residence in 2016-17 The Wizards of Once is a fabulously imaginative, funny and unpredictable adventure that will leave readers desperate for the next instalment.The book is full of gorgeous illustrations by Cressida Cowell, which drag you into the magical world and pull you into Wish and Xar’s adventures. This definitely will not disappoint fans of How To Train Your Dragon. For Wizards of Once, I was wanting to have a personification of evil magic. And I just couldn’t think of a better word than ‘witch’ because it carries such weight. The word ‘witch’… suddenly you’re thinking of the witches in The Wizard of Oz, for example. Because we’ve got such a history of believing in terrifying witches in the past, I think it’s the associations that that word carries. I was very careful to make the witches both male and female because I don’t approve of how witches are often made out to be only female! I could have gone another way but that’s what I chose the witches to personify.