I have many plans! My retirement from teaching in the summer will hopefully mean I have more time and energy to focus on writing. My seldom-used dining room is about to be transformed into a magnificent writer’s room, probably with help from Ikea. I’ll have time to start work on redrafting my YA novel, The Reader of Caledon, a dark fantasy with echoes of The Hunger Games, set in an alternative Glasgow, and on redrafting The Superpower Switch Off, a MG adventure about four young superheroes who lose their superpowers after a misuse of powers incident in school, and have to continue to battle a Supervillain without them.

Finally, thank you to everyone who sent recipes, and photos of themselves for our projects. The class video, and recipe book are on their way, and I will share them with you as soon as they are ready! Our Maths this week has some calculation based activities, and then a longer investigation. The instructions for this are there to help you through each ‘stage’ of the activity – most importantly DON’T PANIC! During the last week of term I will be uploading a summer challenge, which will lay out some activities you could complete over the holidays. These will all be short tasks which will just help to keep your skills sharp in preparation for you starting in Year Six in September. I have to admit, that while doing my research it was all too easy to scurry down rabbit holes. There were so many fascinating dramas and tragedies involving Titanic survivors in the years after the sinking, and I did have to rein myself in quite often. With stories such as The Titanic Detective Agency, how do you balance the facts and the fiction? In 2015 her WW1 novel Shell Hole was shortlisted for the Dundee Great War Children’s Book Prize and she enjoyed engaging in research so much that she was inspired to write another historical novel, A Pattern of Secrets, this time focusing on her local area.

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We are finishing up our Titanic project this week, with a final piece of writing and a craft challenge! I’m hoping to put together the pictures of your work into a project book to show off everything we have studied about the ship, so please feel free to send pictures over to me. The setting up of the detective agency and The Mystery of the Strange Boy and the Treasure Map are the only parts of the story which are pure fiction, and while the adventure creates an exciting and entertaining plot, I didn’t allow it to interfere with the real-life timeline of events. The other mystery which Bertha’s detective agency attempts to solve, The Case of the Mysterious Mr Hoffman, is completely factual, and proves that the truth is often stranger than fiction! You provide resources to support teachers using your books. Could you tell us a little more about the types of resources you provide and what their objectives are? My autumn calendar is already filling up with invitations to book festivals, libraries and schools, and it will be lovely to balance my working life between writing and talking about writing! Have you any tips for aspiring authors?

Thank you so much for all of your hard work – I love hearing from you and seeing the work you are producing! This week I am collecting selfies to make another video – feel free to send some pictures across which show what you have been up to! I can’t wait to see you all! My publisher, Anne Glennie at Cranachan Books, asked me to write a story set on the Titanic, with a Scottish twist. I searched the passenger lists for a Scottish child and found 12-year-old Bertha Watt from Aberdeen. She was perfect, being both the right age and travelling in 2nd Class with her mother. Bertha’s father had travelled to America six months earlier to start a new job as an architect in Portland, Oregon and this was good news, both for him and for my plot, as only 8% of 2nd Class male passengers survived the sinking and it wouldn’t do to have my main character suffering such a close family bereavement at the end of the book. I was well aware that my audience are young children and while there is no avoiding the fact that the sinking was a terrible tragedy, I didn’t want The Titanic Detective Agency to be a harrowing read. The period detail is meticulously researched, the characters utterly compelling and not a word is wasted.

Titanic Virtual Tour (Long Version)

I have uploaded some more videos to the Video Resource Centre, the end of The Titanic Detective Agency is now there, along with a Memories video to go along with our work on The Piano.We are continuing with our work on The Piano this week, and I can’t wait to see what you all come up with. You sent across some beautiful pieces of work last week, and I was really impressed with the way that you all managed to capture the emotions of the video. Jeri Westerson – an author in 3 genres, most relevant here are the Crispin Guest novels, described by Jeri as Medieval Noir Lindsay Littleson has four grown-up (ish) children and lives in the village of Uplawmoor near Glasgow. Her younger son is studying drama and Lindsay is unfailingly supportive, not wanting to repeat her faux pas of nearly thirty years ago when she tried to talk a young Ewan McGregor out of becoming an actor. She’s a full-time primary teacher and loves her job. Before becoming a teacher she spent eight years as possibly the worst PAYE auditor ever to be employed by the Inland Revenue.

Bertha Watt, tree-climber and would-be polar explorer, is excited to be on RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage, as she leaves Aberdeen behind for the glamour of a new life in America. I’m aware that Titanic is a really popular topic in UK schools and that a lot of children are fascinated by the subject, so it’s a big plus that the book will have ready-made, eager, well-informed audiences. However, The Titanic Detective Agency isn’t a textbook and I was keen to avoid long, detailed descriptions of the ship’s fixtures and fittings. Similarly, I didn’t include masses of technical detail about the construction of the ship. My research was thorough, and I learned how many rivets were used to build the ship (3 million), but I didn’t feel the need to include information children could find out by googling 5 Fascinating Facts about the Titanic. This week I will be online at the times below. I am still teaching Year Six at the moment too, so I will be replying, but it may be a little slower than normal! In June, I made a delightful trip to Mull to meet the staff and pupils of Dervaig Primary. Getting to do an event in their gorgeous Community Orchard was a real privilege. I also learned a lot about the local wildlife. When one wee lad told me he was missing his hens, I asked if they’d been taken by a fox. He gave me a look. “There are no foxes on Mull, Lindsay. The otters came down the hill and killed all my hens.” And there was me, thinking otters were cute. Then Johan appears, he needed someone who could read the letter and map, and he finds Bertha. They can't understand each other but miming helps!

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As a primary teacher, I am confident about working with primary aged children and am happy to do upper school assemblies lasting three-quarters of an hour to an hour. My goals during these talks are to encourage and inspire primary aged pupils to write their own stories, by telling them about my own journey to publication and by talking about my inspirations in writing my books and the importance of creating an interesting setting and characters with distinctive voices. I’ll read an extract from one or two of my novels, depending on teacher/organiser preferences, and will finish with a question and answer session. If preferred or as an add-on to the assembly, I can organise creative writing workshops with individual classes. I will be online every day this week, and will be hosting ‘Live’ sessions on the class blog during the following times. This week I will be 'Live' on our blog during the times below - please come and say hello! I will be uploading another emoji quiz to challenge you - you can all join in and we can see whoever has the most correct answers! Bertha is a feisty girl with a vivid imagination, whose insatiable curiosity focuses on both passengers and crew. Together with fellow traveller Madge, she becomes interested in the mysterious of Mr. Hoffman, who is travelling alone with his two small children. But very soon, her investigations are interrupted by the appearance of Johan, a Swedish teenager on his way to join his father in South Dakota. Despite the fact that Johan speaks no English and is a third-class passenger, strictly segregated from the rest of those on board, he and Bertha work together to decipher what seems to be a map leading to a treasure hidden somewhere on the ship.

The recipe books is developing nicely, and I have asked the other children who are in school, to share some of their recipes too, so hopefully we will have a lot of recipes to choose from soon!Thank you to everyone who has shared questions and challenges for the next maths Kahoot challenge - if there are any more to come please send them over in the next couple of days! A historical story based on the story of the Titanic. We are told about the unsinkable ship and how it is built for luxury not speed. Overshadowing these adventures, of course, is the iceberg in the Titanic's path. There's plenty of foreshadowing, with the word "unsinkable" being bandied about with aplomb, discussions of how much more dangerous a trans-Atlantic dirigible flight would be, and the occasional glance at the number of lifeboats. There are some shorter challenges included here, and some longer challenges too! I will upload the video for you to mark your arithmetic work towards the end of next week. As always, you can send over things that you have finished for us to look at and enjoy! The treasure map is in the hands of 3rd Class passenger Johan, a young Swedish boy who's desperate to get to America and bring the rest of his family across. He doesn't speak any English, and Bertha doesn't speak any Swedish, but somehow they manage to communicate.

Like the author's previous historical novel for Cranachan, A Pattern of Secrets, the class divisions of society are clearly drawn; the Titanic itself is a stratified society in microcosm.