ALL MINE! by Zehra Hicks, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

  

Having recently had a Cornish holiday during which large eager seagulls were very keen to share our lunch pasties, bright bold picture book ‘All Mine!’ caught my eye. 

I think this is a wonderful book.  The story is short and simple, but the pictures fizz with characterful energy, movement and humour. 

Mouse is about to tuck into his sandwich lunch when – woosh! – the greedy seagull swoops down to steal it and claim that it’s ‘All mine!’  Seagull gets ticked off by mouse who tells him that it’s rude to snatch.  We then get a wonderful comic- strip episode of the mouse trying to find more lunch, but stalked by the ‘gull who steals it all, even when he’s clearly told that if only he was polite Mouse would share with him.  Seagull doesn’t learn from being told.  It’s only a good scare that finally sees him off … leaving Mouse to share his huge cake with his politer, mousey, friends.

This is a story about learning to share; something very pertinent to young children, but served-up in a way that is anything but preachy.  They will recognise the truths in the story, and come to their own conclusions about any rights and wrongs it shows.

So, this is a fun picture book for all, particularly for summertime.  But it also offers an opportunity for teachers or parents to discuss issues of sharing and bullying with children, and demonstrates interesting and easily doable ways to combine media to make your own pictures.  I now want to get some thick poster paint to ‘ice’ a photograph of a cake, and sprinkle hundreds and thousands to stick into that paint icing!  Maybe make my own simple shape-on-a-stick fox mask too?  Come to think of it, I could see this making a relatively simple, funny and telling little play for any primary school class tasked with putting on an assembly soon after the summer holidays.

Pippa Goodhart

www.pippagoodhart.co.uk                                        

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

The Rabbit Problem, by Emily Gravett, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

This is a fascinating, funny and beautiful book which is more of a starting-point for readers, for parents and teachers, than it is a fully realised story. 

I'm sure that young children find lots of interest and amusement in the pictures of growing numbers of characterful rabbits, counting them and spotting little visual stories happening, but really this is a book for children of perhaps six plus.  Created to work as a calander (it even has a hole so that you could hang it up), the double-page spreads chart the monthly changes that occur in Fibbonaci's Field. 

I had never heard of Fibonacci or his mathematical theory based on rabbit breeding, but a bit of googling tells me that this Italian mathematician in 1202 (would he have been amused to think that he was being mentioned in relation to children's books in 2012?) investigated how fast rabbits could breed, given ideal conditions, assuming you begin with a single rabbit who is joined by one other of the opposite sex, and that each breeding session results in another breeding pair.  Rabbits apparently reproduce once a month once they've reached the age of two months.  The results are hilariously depicted by Emily Gravett as the watercolour field that changes through the seasons becomes inhabited by more and more and more rabbits (all depicting very human emotions), and culminating with a wonderful pop-up explosion of them!  Any scruples about brothers and sisters mating have to be cast aside (I've no idea whether or not rabbits cast them aside in real life!). 

So this is a book that raises questions mathemetical and biological which an imaginative teacher could develop, and actually develop into just about every area of the curriculum.  Carrot printing, carrot recipes, knitting, rabbit exercises, newspaper reportage, growing seeds, the weather, time passing, population growth leading to rationing, temperature, genetics, reproduction, measuring, and more are all there to be found and developed.  Why not have a Rabbit Problem week for your class?  And if you want a fully rounded story, then why not get each child to pick one of those rabbits, and write their particular story?  Then they could be 'their' rabbit in an assembly drama of the whole book, ending with every one of your class rabbits leaping into the air!

Enjoy!

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE