Use this page as a jumping off point to other pages because if you go to my INTRODUCTION you will actually learn a lot about me, but in a nutshell I am a wife, a mother and grandmother and also a retired teacher, although retired doesn't seem to be the right word.

As for being a "poet" this is a relatively new thing in my life and, as you will learn from my introduction, it was the children in my local school who told me they really liked poetry, but it had to be rhyming and rhythmic as far as they were concerned, and they said they liked story poems. So I tried writing one for them and that was five years ago and now there are 900. I hasten to add that I do not confine myself to rhyming poems for Key Stage 1 and 2 but write in a variety of styles for much older children too. So tell the secondary teachers that you meet that there is good material on this website for them also. Thanks.

I made this website at the request of these children also for they said they wanted to read my poems at home with their family. I really didn't think at the time that my words would be carried to every corner of the earth, but they are and not only from my internet website. I think it hits me how far they go when I receive orders for the Ebooks. Nova Scotia is, so far, the most northerly point that I've sent an E-Book, and New Zealand the most southerly point, but they go into many countries in between because rhyming and rhythmic poetry it seems is a great way to learn English. Last week I did a Skype visit to Dover, Delaware in the USA and the next day I went to The British School of Costa Rica. There I met about 65 children and they were all prepared and excited for my visit. They had learned three of my poems from Simply Sensational and wanted to proudly perform them to show me how, as a second language, they were learning English and having lots of fun along the way.

I love Skype visits and they are so easy. It is also much cheaper for schools to have authors visit them in this way as a day with an author can be very expensive. For myself I have travelled to and from classrooms all my working life and it is great just to have to walk to my computer to say hello and "inspire" the children. It means I can go in and out of a school for several short visits, and not get lost on the way once.

I'm trying to embrace modern technology, as you can see, but also discovering that at one touch of a button, by accident, I can wipe out all the illustrations on this website. Oh dear!!!! I thought I'd never sleep again, but knew that worse things can happen in life. I do my best to write poems for children of all age groups, and try to stretch their imaginations and vocabularies. I do believe that children need more than giggle poems, although they love these too. I especially try to give to teachers material that they will find useful in their classrooms, and hope that they will recommend this website to others. If you have not told anyone else that this website exists, please do so. Above all, come and say hello in the guestbook because lots of people like to read it, but if nobody puts anything in then there's not much to read.

To return to the subject of modern technology, I am lucky enough to hold the copyright on my poems, something that many poets lose once they let their books go to publishers. So I have made E-books for you because I am told by teachers how useful they are. At a touch of a button they can be with you and a thank you letter from me at the same time. Instead of buying 30 books for your class, a poem can be projected onto your classroom screen where everyone can concentrate whilst you teach, rather like a blackboard of my days I suppose. I also think of all the forests that will be saved when trees are not cut down in such numbers to make paper. These things are important to me and should be to you also. Hundreds of my poems were chosen by teachers across West Yorkshire for publication, but I have written double that number since. The poems were taken into classrooms by an educational publisher and I was told the teachers found it difficult to know which poems to leave out of the books. So that was a big surprise for me, a first time writer. Writing poetry and maintining this website keeps me busy and my mind active, which they say is good for you, ha ha.

Now, before I go: Look at the top of the page at the link buttons. They will take you to pages which I think might interest you.

Thank you for coming to my website and enjoy what you read. Josie