A fishy exuberance

Front cover

Hooray for Fish!  is nothing  but exuberant!   Written and illustrated by Lucy Cousins, the creator of Maisy Mouse, it is such a fun picturebook, with wonderfully bright illustrations and in her well known gouache style, of large blocks of colour outlined in black.  Cousins also does all the characteristic lettering by hand.  

The edition I have comes with a DVD read by Emilia Fox.  It's a nice addition to the picturebook, but certainly couldn't replace it. I love anything with fish in it, so I'm biased, but this is one of my favourites. 

Blue is predominant - it's an underwater setting after all!  But the blues are different in hue, some are baby blue others are more turquoise, and some pages are almost green.  It's nice to just flick through and see all the different shades. 

It's a concept book in rhyme, using colours and adjectives and some opposites, so for ELT that's a good reason to use it!  But to be honest share this one for the visually exciting experience it gives your young students, together with the lovely rhythmic text.  It's truely brilliant. 

Let's take a look at all the different bits.  Front and back cover are one big illustration, showing us a big spotty fish, in orange and yellow with stripy fins and tail.  Big fish is smiling at a little fish, who's just the same.  The blurb on the back reads: "Splosh, splash, splish! Hooray for fish! Swim with Little Fish and all his fishy friends in this splishy-spalshy riot of colour and rhyme under the sea." Let's go swimming then ...

Front endpapers

Splash... into the underworld.  The front endpapers show us the world Little Fish lives in, there's that baby blue and some very interesting sea plants and corals. Lovely.  No fish though. 

Title page and copyright

And here's Little Fish looking very tiny alongside the wavey plant.  He's turned to the right, the direction in which we have to turn the page to meet all his fishy friends. 

Opening 1

I love those sea plants, wavy and stripy and so colourful.  What a wonderful world Little Fish lives in. Let's meet some of his friends. 

Opening 2

Here are some of his colourful, funny friends.  Little Fish's world is full of diversity.  There are spotty fish and stripy fish, happy fish and grumpy fish, all clearly exactly that - the grumpy fish not only has a turned down mouth but he's brown and black, weighted down with a heavy head and small fins, nothing jovial about him at all.  Grumpy has become gripy in the US edition. 

Opening 5

Here's a nice page with the numbers decorating each fish, as though they have different scales.  Upon turning the page, the simplicity of three white fish is contrasted with a page full of multicoloured ones and enables small children to have fun with their counting, as well as discover some funny fish. Can you see two fruity fish?  

Opening 6

From here on Little Fish's world is ever more creative.  An ele-fish, a big grey fish with a trunk, a shelly fish, a sort of squid in a shell, Hairy fish and scary fish, and then ...

Opening 9

... these lovely rhyming fish!  No mistaking what these fish are!  On we swim, past fat fish and thin fish, twin fin-fin fish, two wonderfully colourful fish with large peacock-like fins and tails. "Curly whirly, twisty twirly ... "

Opening 13

"So many friends, so many fish, splosh, splash, splish!"  Leaf fish, horse fish, fishes with hearts and stars and peacock tails.  Long thin ones, spiky ones, flat ray like ones and sea plants with red heart shaped leaves... 

And then, little fish is suddenly all alone.  "Where's the one I love the best, even more than all the rest?" 

Opening 16

Here she is!  It's Mummy Fish! "Kiss, kiss, kiss, hooray for fish!"  And if we turn the page one more time, the back endpapers remind us just how exuberant this lovely book is!

Back endpapers

All the fish that Little Fish encountered are here on the back endpapers.  There's the ele-fish, and the twin fin-fin fish, the grumpy fish and the hairy fish.  All together with Little Fish and Mummy Fish.  It's really is a Hooray for Fish book!

Now how cool was that?  Children love it, and want it again and again.  They pick up the rhyming words really easily and  chant along with you as you share it with them.  And if you want you can do all sorts of fun arty activities related to fish.  Fishy underworld scenes, inventing wild and wonderful fish, making a daddy fish for Little Fish, and maybe even some brothers and sisters!  

There's a very complete set of activities on the Walker Books page which can be downloaded here and adapted for varied ELT contexts. 

If you haven't got the the DVD you can use the YouTube version of the film, and you and your children can tell the story when the music stops! The music is fun and calypso-like and accompanies Little Fish on his encounters with his fishy friends - trumpets sound when he meets the ele-fish and the music becomes slow and sad when he meets the grumpy fish.  

If you like Lucy Cousins you may also like an earlier post about the picturebook I'm the best.

Emily Gravett's chameleon

Image on opening page of Emily Gravett's website 

Happy New year!

I thought I'd start this year with a look at one of my favourite illustrators, Emily Gravett. There's an interesting article to be read in the Telegraph from 2007, which gives you an idea of how she began her life as an illustrator. 

What I love about her illustrations is that they are so skillfull - she's a good old fashioned drawer - and most of her books are brilliantly illustrated using crayon / graphite, with watercolour washes.  She also uses ripped paper collages in some titles.  Here's a great video of her drawing "Cave Baby" for a book she illustrated with Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo)

I bought Wolves first, her debut book and an award winning title, and then it was just a case of collecting them -  lovely, lovely illustrations alongside a great sense of visual humour.  

I thought I'd share Blue Chameleon in my first post about her. It has a simple minimal text, and lovely sketchy illustrations.  Here you can see the covers, front and back, which introduce our hero, a sad looking, blue chameleon.  On the back cover there are three adjectives, each one crossed out, describing our chameleon and at the same time giving us a clue about what happens inside the book.  

As with all good picturebooks the endpapers contribute to the narrative, the front endpapers show us a glum looking pale chameleon.  And the copyright / dedication page is lovely too.   The information is shown in the shape of a chameleon!

And so the story continues with an image of chameleon, sitting in a pose similar to that on the front cover, with a thought bubble saying, "I'm lonely".  The words describe the chameleon "Blue chameleon", but blue is referring to his mood and his colour.   Each page has lots of white, which enhance the drawings and make them all the more stunning. The chameleon changes colour and shape depending on what he sees. And each time there's a speech bubble which brings something extra and humorous to each spread.  As you can see from the image below, the chameleon represents the colour, and each object is drawn and labelled neatly on each facing page.  We could say it was rather like a concept book, to reinforce colours and adjectives, but it's one with a difference for there's a story there too.  

As we turn the pages, visually there's always a pattern, the chameleon remains on the left and the object on the right. 

... and so the chameleon meets a pink cockatoo and says "Hello Hello Hello"; a swirly snail, and says "Nice to meet you"; 

... a brown boot (a cowboy boot) and says, "Howdy" of course!; a stripy sock and says "Can I hang out with you?"; a spotty ball (purple spots, which he imitates beautifully) and says "Pssst"; a gold fish, whose scales he cleverly captures, and he just blows silent bubbles.

Then finally he meets a green grasshopper  and he jumps across the double spread for the first time, breaking the visual routine, it's quite shocking to see him in desperation, with a stripy yellow / green belly, imitating the grasshopper and calling out, "Come back".  Poor chameleon.

And that's it.  He gives up.  We see him lying on a rock, all grey. Holding his head and visibly sighing. Notice how the words have returned to left and right, but the chameleon is mostly on the right hand, recto page. 

The penultimate page is all white, "White page", but if you look closely you can see a relief outline of the chameleon lying down and a hand is extended from off page, a hand similar to chameleon's, and a speech bubble "Hello?". That question mark is all important.  I've mentioned speech bubbles before, but children love them in this book and they begin reading them very quickly.  They certainly notice the question mark as it is the first bit of punctuation so far. And yikes, turn the page.   "Colourful chameleons"  greeting one another. 

A great ending, and the back endpapers contribute.  Different from the front ones, showing the two, colourful chameleons and a butterfly.  Off they go, no longer lonely.  Hooray!

Couldn't get much simpler really and such humour too.  Younger kids love this title and chant the colours and objects along with you after just a few readings.  They also enjoy listening to what the chameleon says, and laughing at the jokes.  "Pssst" is their favourite!