In 2011, Donaldson was appointed Children's Laureate succeeding the illustrator Anthony Browne. In keeping with her interest in acting and singing Donaldson has set out to encourage children to perform poetry, plays and dramatised readings to generate a love of books and of reading. Accordingly, she has created a series of Plays to Read for six characters to be performed in the classroom, written by herself and by other writers such as Geraldine McCaughrean, Jeanne Willis, Vivian French, Steve Skidmore and Steve Barlow. The first 36 of these plays, for early readers, were published by Pearson (2013) with a further 24 plays for older primary-school children to following later in the year. She has also compiled an anthology of Poems to Perform by groups of children (to be published by Macmillan in 2013) and has created an interactive website called picturebookplays.co.uk which gives guidance as to how selected picture books can be turned into classroom plays.
