As you know Chip is supporting the 'Get London Reading' campaign along with the 'Homework club' campaign. Well the writer of Horrible Histories - Terry Deary has approached Chip and together they worked on the first mobile phone novel. The novel is called 'The Perfect Poison Pills Plot' and it was written on a Nokia phone. Terry got Chip to narrate it in five short video clips, the whole novel is 1,600 words long and is written as 16 chapters of 100 words- the length of a text message.You can download it direct to your mobile phone for free as texts or video clips.
Check out the first few clips of "The Perfect Poison Pills Plot" below..
Also read what Chip had to say about growing up and books..
"Chipmunk, real name Jahmaal Fyffe, says books were an integral part of his youth, but not any more. "A lot of what I learned as a kid is from books, but if I'm honest, I don't read books now because I'm too busy and on the go.
A lot of people speculate on the link between the riots and literacy, but you have to live inside the circle like I did to know what it's like.
"I am pretty much on track considering the negative environment I grew up in: seeing drugs from an early age, youngsters carrying weapons, almost nobody interested in books. I got my bad nickname because as a kid I was short and fat with big front teeth and the name stuck, but I wasn't that cute.
"I was kicked out of Highgate Wood School [in Hornsey] at 14 for fighting and throwing a bottle that hit a teacher by mistake. Then I went to Gladesmore Community School in Tottenham, where they had a big positive impact on me and I ended up with five As and four Bs for GCSEs."
Chipmunk's career took off at 15 when he visited the Crouch End studio of music producer Sammy Baffour, 31, aka Baff, who recalled: "He came in and told me he was the best for his age, so we put him in the booth and he spat some rhymes. Then he went on radio and did a freestyle rap and the following week had a million viewers on YouTube."
The rapper's first album sold more than 300,000 copies and produced four top-25 singles, and one, Oopsy Daisy, that debuted at number one. Chipmunk is booked to back Snoop Dogg on his UK tour next month.
He says his father, who came to Britain from Jamaica, taught him to read and gave him the lesson that "education is the key to life". The rapper adds: "At the time I felt oppressed by him, but in hindsight I'm grateful because you can't just rely on school to pull you through if the parents are not on board."
Deary, too, was taught to read by his father: "I was born immediately after the war in a very poor area with outside toilets and where lots of houses had no doors because they had been burned for firewood. My dad was a butcher who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and I worked in his shop until I was 15.
"I never went to university. In those days it was 'pass your exams, get a job'. But as a kid my parents did their job, teaching me to read before I went to school, and later I was able to go on and make something of my life."
Electronic media aside, what does Deary believe is the answer to the literacy crisis? "This is the beauty of the Standard campaign," he said.
"It's not only sparking huge debate, but also harnessing the untapped resources of the community. Getting adults to volunteer as reading helpers to augment teachers and parents is brilliant.
"It is waking us up to the fact that schools cannot be held wholly responsible for teaching children to read - we all are."
No comments:
Post a Comment