Category: events

The day is almost over and we wave a fond farewell to our first ever Independent Booksellers Week. And what a week it’s been!

We’ve hosted a Tiger Who Came to Tea party,

a Hugless Douglas craft and story time session, countless impromptu story times, welcomed the ever so lovely Christopher William Hill to Chicken and Frog,

and finished off the week with a Where’s Wally hunt around Brentwood. I would like to thank all of the ‘businesses’ who took part: Mi Neni, Brentwood Theatre, Brentwood Library, B.M.Cycles, Rossi’s, Vintage Verde, French Quarter, The Hair Company, Ya Ya’s, Holly Trees Primary School and Hogarth Primary School. It was a real community triumph, which I am hoping helped to increase footfall today. Also a very big thank-you to the people of Brentwood who chose to come out on this scorchingly hot summer’s day…phew it’s been a hot one!

So that’s it, our first IBW done and dusted. The final part of the day was shared with our Creative Writing Club,

It’s been fantastic. Here’s to our second one!

This morning we awoke to the first day of Independent Booksellers Week (IBW). This is our first ever experience of IBW as booksellers, so the planning stage has been rather daunting. We really wanted to make sure that our passion for books oozed through the week.

Luckily for us we managed to snaffle ourselves an author to start the week off with a bang. The very funny and charming Christopher William Hill agreed to spend the whole day with us. Clearly he had not met us…the poor man.

Here we all are in a terribly cheesy, clearly staged photograph, sporting rather fetching IBW t-shirts,

Throughout the day Christopher spent time with our customers, entertained and was entertained by Max, drank copious amounts of tea (that was our main bargaining power when we asked him to come in) and then spent an hour and a half with the Creative Writing Club,

We really have had a fabulous day and I would like to thank Christopher for coming to sunny Brentwood. And a big thank you to our customers, both regular and new, for sharing part of their Saturday with us.

If you want to know what we’ve got planned for the rest of IBW, check out our events page or scroll down to the previous blog post.

p.s. We will be working with Christopher in the next academic year, to organise school visits. If you want to get involved, let us know!

p.p.s Christopher’s book, Osbert the Avenger, made it onto the Times’ summer reading list. It is that awesome.

Hello all, how is everyone today? Good I hope! Here at Chicken and Frog we have been very busy putting together an exciting holiday programme of events to keep the children busy and the parents sane. For details of all that is going on, check out the events page.

We are really looking forward to the summer hols, but before we get there, next week is Independent Booksellers Week . What does this mean? Well, ideally it’s the time when you embrace your local independent bookshop and show them how much you love them. To this end, the following events are taking place:

On Saturday 29th June, the very lovely Christopher William Hill will be spending the whole day with us. Clearly we have never met or he would never have agreed to such madness. Christopher will be reading extracts from his book, talking about his life as a writer, selling some books (whilst masquerading as a bookseller) and even spending some time with our Creative Writing Club.

On Wednesday 3rd July (13:30-14:30) we are holding a FREE Hugless Douglas event for pre-schoolers. This is a drop in session, where you can make a Hugless Douglas mobile and listen to stories.

Thursday 4th July is Independents Day (clever play on words, we know). To celebrate this and the fact that Judith Kerr has just celebrated her 90th birthday, we will be having a Tiger Who Came to Tea Party, from 11:3-12:30. For just £1 (parents are free), you can eat cake and listen to lots of stories, including The Tiger Who Came to Tea (of course) and various Mog stories.

And finally, to round off Independent Booksellers Week, there will be a Where’s Wally Hunt in Brentwood on Saturday 6th July. Where’s Wally? You need to find him! He’s hiding in the following locations:
Chicken and Frog, Mi Neni, Rossi’s, B.M.Cycles, Ya Ya’s, Brentwood Theatre, Brentwood Library, Vintage Verde (KIngs Road), The Hair Company and French Quarter.

All you have to do is collect a ‘postcard’ from each location and bring them back to us. Easy! The first 100 hunters receive a prize. If you find 8 you will be entered into a bigger prize draw. This is a FREE event, so get involved.

Psst. There will be a bonus Wally at the Holly Trees Summer Fair – chocolate is on offer 😉

So there you go. Lots to do over the next week or so. Enjoy!

Months ago I entered a competition with Scholastic to win a goody bag of free Horrible Histories stuff. I really love free stuff, so was more than happy to write a short email with a gruesome fact about Brentwood.

And then, a little while later, we were called on the phone. She said that we’d won ourselves a Martin Brown! I said ‘Are you sure? We’re very small you know,’ but she was certain. How amazing. The brilliantly talented Martin was booked in to visit us. Look, here he is, in our shop!

And so today, at around half past two, Martin arrived, accompanied by the equally lovely Elizabeth. Needless to say, there was much excitement abounding. Phoenix FM and the Gazette have been ever so generous and enthusiastic with their support, as have local schools. All of which meant that Martin was pretty much trapped with us for three hours, with a constant queue heading out of the door.

Here’s some pics to show it wasn’t all a dream:

Not only did Martin sign books, posters and Rattus stickers, he also spent time talking to all of our visitors. The rather bizarre creation pictured above was drawn by Martin, who asked the children for suggestions to create a character. So now we have a weird and wonderful original Martin Brown drawing. Yay!

As if all of that wasn’t generous enough, Martin then drew out the winning raffle ticket for our free prize draw for this,

The lucky winner will be contacted in the morning…and now I’m off for a snooze.

Hello all. It’s been a frantic couple of days at Chicken and Frog. Happy frantic though, so I thought I’d take a moment to share some photographs. The first lot are from our Crazy Cooking sessions, where we made rocky road, chocolate lollies, marshmallow biscuits and fresh fruit smoothies. Many apologies to the parents who collected their sugar-filled children!

Next we used the brilliant Klutz book Gotcha Gadgets.

We created sneaky codes, disguised ourselves, made ID cards, solved a mystery and that was all before we had even opened our copies of Gotcha Gadgets!

And…yes, and! Today there was the Lego challenge. I’d like to give a big thank-you to the wonderful Andrea at Nickel Books, from whom I stole the idea. You can’t go wrong with Lego in my opinion. We also provided lots of Duplo for our younger guests,

I was really impressed with the great teamwork this afternoon, especially from a lovely group of boys who hadn’t met each other before today. Inspiring.

Bring on the drama workshop, our Teddy Bears’ Picnic and Russell’s drawing class to round the week off.

Wowser, what a busy day we’ve had today. Aside from the Family Learning Project, Bring Daddy to Story-time and Creative Writing Club (which is our normal Saturday), we were lucky enough to welcome Karen McCombie into Chicken and Frog. Karen signed books and talked about life as a writer. This would have been enough, but then she very kindly joined our Creative Writing Club and jolly well inspired them!

Top tips for avoiding DULL writing, coupled with a mammoth Q & A session resulted in a group of highly enthused young writers (plus me – not quite so young, but certainly inspired).

We’d like to say a very clucky and hoppy thank-you to Karen and her lovely daughter Millie, for taking a mosey on down to sunny Brentwood. Cluck, ribbit!

We’re going all European (I know technically we are, but…). During the summer holidays, Romina will be running a weekly Spanish club for your little ones.

If you want more info or would like to book in, please contact Romina on 07912615118 or gramec88@hotmail.com

This week has been a bit crazy. From dinner at the House of Lords (very fancy), to supporting Year 6 in their mock SATs week, to purchasing awesome Alice in Wonderland costumes (for the shop, honest).

We were asked to write a 500 word piece for Archant Life (regional magazine publisher) all about being an indie bookseller, linked to Independent Booksellers Week, which takes place from 29th June to 6th July this year. It was a welcome surprise to have been asked, but I could ramble on for pages about what and why we do what we do, so 500 words was a bit of a challenge!

Ooh, we signed up for the Booksellers Association/ Saatchi & Saatchi ‘Books are my bag’ initiative. From September you’ll be able to pick up one of these cool bags, with our name printed underneath the main tagline. This is a superb way of promoting the importance of books and we are delighted to be a part of it.

What else? Well, Horrible Histories have confirmed that illustrator extraordinaire, Martin Brown, will be with little old us on Friday 7th June. He’ll be visiting us after school kicks out, so we are inviting you horrible lot to come in and be gruesome. Fancy dress is encouraged (although not compulsory!), with a prize for the most ghastly. I’m not excited at all.*

*That is a huge lie.

As well as all of that, we have met lots of lovely new customers, read stories, sold books, booked in baby massage classes, tutored, sorted out lots of beautiful new titles, organised a song writing workshop for the summer…phew. No wonder I’m tired! Not enough for you? You are a demanding bunch. Ok, last thing then. As of June (I think), you will be able to get a 10% voucher off of all books when you book a ticket to see a show at the fantastic Brentwood Theatre. So get booking!

This time last year myself and Mr Frog were seriously considering opening a children’s bookshop. Crazy I know, but that’s us. We scurried off to the marvellous London Book Fair for the first time ever and let me tell you, we were completely overwhelmed by the experience.

We met with publishers, authors and wholesalers. It was a complete whirlwind, but it didn’t put us off. Within six months we had taken the daunting and very exciting step to open our very own bookshop. Chicken and Frog went from a ridiculous daydream (and an accountant’s nightmare) to reality.

We opened our doors to the public six months ago this Saturday. I can’t believe where the time has gone or how well (touches wood, thumbs a lucky rabbit foot etc) it is all going. We’re paying our bills, feeding all three of our children every day and even selling books. Hurrah!

To celebrate our first six months we will be taking 20% off of everything (books, not clothing, don’t be scared), reading lots of stories and generally enjoying owning the coolest bookshop in town. Yeah, I can say that. It’s good to be proud of your achievements. Working with Mr Frog has been super duper. We feel like we are a part of the community and have got to make some good friends. Our customers are the best customers ever.

I’m going to get slightly mushy now – sorry. This would not be possible without the support of our beautiful children, who have had to change their lifestyle considerably. Also, my long suffering parents for manning the shop, tutoring (daddy) and being brilliant grandparents. Same goes for Mr Frog Senior when it comes to Grandad duties and general support. And, last but not least, our lovely friend Claire Mackaness who started the journey with us and now has her own beautiful nest in Ingrave.

In the past six months we have held a writing competition with the fabby Julie D Irwin, been visited by Julie (she must be sick of us), Tamsyn Murray, Lucy Coats, Michelle Robinson and J.N.Paquet. We’ve hosted parties, set up a very busy tuition centre, told stories, run a FairTrade event, secured funding for the Family Learning Project, hosted a huge range of school holiday events, hired our room out to baby massage therapists, an OT, a home-school group…and lots more. Many apologies if I have left you off of the list. It’s all been rather exhausting and jolly good fun.

Here’s to the next part of the journey. Keep on reading!

We have had the most lovely of afternoons here at Chicken and Frog. Michelle Robinson (children’s author extraordinaire) visited us for a huge chunk of the day, reading stories, singing songs and having a good old chat about the life of a writer.

We have been tweeting each other for a few months now, so it felt like I already knew Michelle when she arrived. I think we share the same slightly quirky sense of humour, which is a good thing, otherwise I am aware that I may just come across as a bit ‘eccentric’.

Children and parents came in and out through the day, to meet Michelle and have a story or two or three…

It was really interesting to find out how the whole publishing system works, especially when you are the author of a picture book. I had no idea about the process that goes on behind the scenes. Just like any job I suppose, if you are not part of a specific industry, you are not always aware of its complexities. I have always admired authors and illustrators hugely (good job too), but now I do even more so.

Michelle has kindly signed lots of her books, so if you didn’t get a chance to meet her today, they are here waiting for you.

A small selection of Michelle’s books. Michelle has written a range of picture books, from board books to hilarious tales of escaping startled elephants.