Ta da...

This competition was fun - I will have to do this again soon. And now as you can probably tell from the drum roll I am about to announce the winner. Congratulations to Vanessa Hatley-Owen who reminded me how much I love the word Oubliette (which sounds cute and fun but actually means something rather nasty) and makes me want to go rent out the movie Labyrinth (also a smashing word in itself). Vanessa let me know what book you would like. And I enjoyed doing this so much I have picked another winner at random. 5inabus gets a copy of The House That Went to Sea. Email me at melinda@tale-spin.com with postal details too peeps.

And folks if you have not already checked out the most awesome NZ Poetry Box blog run by fab poet Paula Green go take a look now. This is a blog for children, parents and teachers up to year 8. Paula posts tips, challenges, competitions, interviews and poems by children amongst other things. She has already run a number of challenges and awarded prizes to young poets from schools (and individually) all around New Zealand.

Paula recently ran the first Fabulous Poetry Competition for Children and after receiving nearly 2,000 poems has selected twenty to appear in the A Treasury of New Zealand Poetry for Children to be published by Random House. I cannot wait to see this fabulous book. Paula said:-

it was an ELEPHANT task reading my way through them all. It was really hard narrowing it down as there were so many wonderful entries. I think some schools must be little writing havens as they sent in so many good poems.

There were poems about cats, dogs, paddocks, beaches, the moon, wizards, witches, blue, yellow, fireworks, families, feelings, dragons, space, people, places, the world, gardens and a thousand other things. There were fat poems, skinny poems, funny poems, musical poems, poems that rhyme, poems that don’t, scary poems, thoughtful poems, imaginative poems, surprising poems, sad poems, happy poems.

There were similies that popped and words that shone.