Famous for munching up flights of stairs, and even escalators (where do you think the word ‘ravenous’ comes from!?) Mortimer the raven is best known as the hilarious troublemaker who first appeared in Joan Aiken’s Arabel’s Raven stories on Jackanory – and of course in Quentin Blake’s wonderful pictures!
But his adventures with the Jones family and his beloved friend Arabel, have surprisingly also made him a HERO with teachers of reluctant readers. Here’s a letter from one of them – (thank you, Anne!)
“I had a class of 10 and 11 year olds, one of whom was having great difficulty in learning to read. Well, let’s be blunt about this, he couldn’t even read his name. He and I worked long and hard on this problem, mainly with the help of his brother’s motorbike manual, and eventually he began to make sense of the words on the page and I began to understand how to strip a bike engine. (All the best teaching goes two ways!) But, at last, the day I knew he’d really made it as an independent reader was all down to Joan Aiken.
Every afternoon in that class began with us all putting our feet up with a good book and reading silently for twenty minutes or so. (How else does a hard pressed teacher get time to read?) On this particular afternoon we were all well into our books when there comes a suppressed snigger from the general direction of this lad’s desk. I decide to ignore it. Then there is another, rather less well suppressed, and finally an outright chortle. He was almost unaware of what he was doing so engrossed was he in the book that he could now read well enough to really enjoy. And the book? Aiken’s ‘Arabel’s Raven’. I bless her regularly for turning him into a real reader.”
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The BBC TV series (as above) was produced with puppets based on the
wonderful illustrations by
Quentin Blake
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Read more about the Arabel and Mortimer stories here
Two New Puffin Bumper Collections out now!
and you can even do the jigsaw!
Joan Aiken 