Sharing plorringes

Front cover

Norris the bear who shared is a delightful picturebook by Catherine Rayner, where her beautifully crafted illustrations are to drool over. Norris is a big brown bear represented in chunky brush strokes, Violet is a tiny delicate mouse with a pink tail and Tulip is a fidgety raccoon in black, grey and white. They all love plorringes, but there's only one in the plorringe tree. 

From the title and cover of this lovely picturebook we know that Norris shares, we read the words and we see him giving Violet a piece of orange fruit.  If we look on the back cover, the illustration continues ...

Back and front covers

Norris has also given Tulip a piece of the orange fruit.  This is not a story about learning to share, instead it is one about knowing that sharing is part of what we do.  Small children find sharing difficult and Norris shows them that it's easy.  But he also shows them that sometimes we have to wait for good things.

Let's have a look inside... the half-title page shows us a plorringe, no bear, no raccoon, no mouse, just the object of desire.

Half-title page

The font is orange throughout, reflecting the sumptuous colour of the plorringe, which looks like a mango, cuts like an orange and resembles a guava inside. 

Title page

The title page brings our focus back to Norris, big brown Norris: the bear who shared. When we turn the page, the plorringe and Norris are together for the first time.

Opening 1

Norris stretches across the spread, as though sniffing the fruit.  "Norris was wise..."  he knew that if he waited the fruit would fall.  So he waited. 

Opening 3

Tulip and Violet weren't quite so wise, "They clambered closer to the plorringe and gazed at it.  It looked delicious."  Norris just waited. 

The next spreads use the senses to describe the plorringe. Tulip and Violet sniffed it. "It smelt of honey and sunny days." Norris waited. Tulip and Violet listened to the plorringe and of course there was no sound!  

Opening 7

"Tulip and Violet hugged the plorringe.  It felt soft as candyfloss."  (Yummy!) Norris kept on waiting. This illustration is a delight. I like the balance between the verbal text and the illustration.  Last of all ...

Opening 8

A close up of two very pink tongues and the plorringe itself:  "Tulip and Violet were just about to have a little lick of the plorringe, when ..." Those three dots tell us that something is about to happen! "UH-OH!" "WHOMP!"

Opening 11

"Norris's wait was over." But Violet and Tulip are visibly concerned. "What about Tulip and Violet?"

Opening 12

Do you see that some of the font is slightly bigger, emphasising "Violet" and "Tulip" and the words "wise" and "kind". Violet and Tulip look so forlorn... Of course Norris shared the "delicious, sun-kissed, soft-as-candy floss plorringe" (all descriptors used in previous spreads).  And Norris knew a "special thing had happened under the plorringe tree" ...

Back verso

Ahhh!  Just lovely. Friendship and sharing as well as learning to wait, all important lessons for little ones.  There's not a lot of repetition, so this is probably best shared with children in bilingual contexts, though I've shared it with a group of Portuguese L1 children and used English and Portuguese to get the verbal message across, and gradually moved into English only as I've re-read it.  The children love seeing Violet and Tulip about to lick the plorringe and call out "UH-OH!" "WHOMP!", before I've tuned the pages!  We all agree that Norris was very wise as he knew how important it was to share. 

What does it mean to be a Huey?

Front cover

The Hueys in The new jumper is Oliver Jeffers' latest picturebook, and by the title it looks like there's going to be a whole series of them - and the back cover confirms it, "An irresistible new series from award-winning picture book creator, Oliver Jeffers." 

The Hueys ... I remember seeing the blob-like creatures on Jeffers' website, on some design work he had up there, but I went back today and they are gone.  They are great little characters, which is amazing when they are just blobby, bouncing-beanie-kind-of-things with stick legs and arms.  Their penis-like noses hang between two dots for eyes and not all of them have mouths. Yet they are as full of expression as anything. Jeffers has pulled a biggie this time. Here's the promo film, which is up on Youtube.

Simple, no minimal, is probably the best word to describe what Jeffers has done in creating the Hueys.  They are simple little creatures, black and white, making a black and white kind of book.  There are none of those lovely watercoloured pages like in Lost and found or the collaged creations found in The INCREDIBLE book eating boy, but the insertion of a powdery blue page or a delicate pastel green remind me of The great paper caper, which  uses these colours, as does Stuck!  But this minimalism works really well.  

Front endpapers

When we open the book (I have the hard back edition, and it's still not available in paperback) we are presented with five Hueys, parading across the front endpapers. 

Copyright and title pages

The title page omits the orange from the front cover, cleverly emphasizing the dullness that monotony and black and whiteness can bring to life. Even the blobs are bored saying, "bla bla blabity bla" "mm hmm" ... 

I was surprised, when I turned the page, that Jeffers' characteristic hand written font didn't continue into the body of the book ... it does as we'll see later, but as the Huey voices. That's kind of nice.  So this (is it Times Roman?) font represents that voice over we heard on the Youtube video, like the nice man's voice we hear on children's programmes; a matter of fact sort of BBC-kind-of-voice, can you hear it?

Opening 1

My photos aren't good, but you can just make out that the recto page is beige. First one Huey, then two, the beige background accentuating their minimal form and sameness. Then turn the  page again and ...

Opening 2

It's confirmed, "There were many, many of them..." and they are all the same.  They all look the same, think the same (they all think about drinking tea!) and they do the same things (hang up pictures!), that is until our special Huey "- Rupert was his name -" made himself a jumper. 

Opening 5

Here's where the orange returns, bright, in fact quite stark against the muted pastel and white.  A slashing dash of colour and Rupert looks the bee's knees, though "Not everyone agreed with his taste..."  Look at how a simple line across the nose makes a Huey look uncertain, or just moving the willy nose across makes a Huey look secretive. And Rupert is whistling away, very proud of his new jumper. Keep looking at those Hueys faces.  

Opening 6

These Hueys just don't understand Rupert, the thing that united the Hueys was their sameness.   Rupert found his freind Gillespie, who "thought being different was interesting." So he knitted a jumper for himself, just like Rupert's. 

Opening 8

Now Gillespie was different too, and Rupert didn't look quite "so strange anymore".  Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and soon lots of Hueys were making jumpers so they could be different too. 

Opening 11

And before you know it, each and every Huey was different. The message being given to everyone makes a mockery of their being different! "Do you like our new jumpers?"  Is this Huey speaking to the rest of the Hueys or is he asking us, the reader? 

Then thank goodness for Rupert, who, true to form, made a mind blowing decision...

Opening 12

He decided to wear a hat! Look at Gillespie's face! "And that changed everything ..." But that's not the end, turn over to see the back endpapers, please!

Back endpapers

Wow the Hueys have gone wild!  Don't they look good?  

So is this picturebook for little kids?  Yes, I htink it would work nicely with early primary, but it would also be a wonderful starting point for discussion with a group of teens or young adults.  If taken at a deeper philosophical level we are looking at how we see identity; just how unique are we and what are the consequences of our actions?  Are we leaders or followers?  Just how important is it to be different and who decides what's different anyway? Oooh!  This simple little book is loaded! 

What's more, these Huey guys are going to be all the rage (mark my words!). You can already make your own Huey here, and there are fun activity sheets here.  Primary children will love these, and so will you, it's such fun!  Here's my Huey ...

From http://www.makeyourownhuey.com/

The Hueys are being marketed, like no other Oliver Jeffers character yet. There'll be Huey t-shirts and Huey mugs.  Watch out! The Hueys are here!

Copy Cat

Front cover

Copy Cat by Mark Birchall was sent to me by the publishers Child's Play at the end of last year, and I've been meaning to write about it ever since.  A lovely picturebook with a great little message and lots to see in the illustrations. 

"Cat was small and Dog was big, and whatever Dog did, Cat did too..."  Ever been 'copy catted'? This picturebook will go a long way in helping children overcome the frustration of 'putting up' with someone who's always around - it's a story about sharing, playing and being friends.

Back and front covers

Front and back covers make one complete picture, a bright blue sky and just the tips of a hills and mounts with occasional houses and trees on them. The title sits tightly in Cat's parachute, floating in behind Dog, already hinting at who copies who. But as we turn the pages, we'll discover that Cat is actually better than Dog, even if he is copying. Look at his happy face in comparison to Dog's, she looks plain scared!

End papers

The cameos of Cat and Dog on the endpapers continue to show us that Dog isn't as good as Cat at most things.  Cat can skate, Dog can't; Cat's plants grow strong and healthy, Dog's don't ... this message is shown in the illustrations only, throughout the picturebook, and I was left wondering if there is a deviousness to Mark Birchall's story, is he telling us boys are better than girls? That's one to wonder at!

Dedication and copyright page and title page

A fun set of dedications, imitating children's drawings and on the title page, our two characters are busy painting.  Cat copying Dog, but look, even here, Dog paints up side down, left to right, Cat paints upside down and right to left (even more skillful!).  This is a lovely title page, cleverly telling and showing. 

Opening 1

"Cat was small and Dog was big, and whatever Dog did, Cat did too." Dinosaur hunting.  Who saw the dino first?  Balancing on the hire wire, guess who is less wobbly! "'Copycat', said Dog."

Opening 3

They went digging for pirate treasure, and who finds it? Deep sea diving and off to the moon.  

Opening 6

It is here on the moon, that Dog really blew ... "Why must you always follow me?" Dog looks mad, and Cat does too (and in the background we can see that Dog didn't do too well at landing her red rocket).
Next day, Dog went dragon hunting (no Cat), then the day after she went looking for the North Pole (no Cat). She wanted to play soccer, but it's not much fun on your own, so she went to find Cat. 

Opening 9

Poor Cat, he had spots! So Dog looked after him, making him soup, giving him medicine and reading him stories and of course Cat got better.  So much better he went to find Dog, to play with. She wasn't anywhere to be found...

Opening 13

Dog was in bed with spots! Now who's a copycat? And of course Cat has to look after Dog now!   
There's a nice little final verso page, of the two friends, well and happy.  Dog leading with map in hand, but Cat knows the way, he can read the signs!  Off they go to The Great Unknown, together. 


It's a cute little book, nothing complex, just a good story, with a neat little message. The illustrations support the words, but if we look carefully they go beyond them - who really knows what to do and does it better?  But does it matter, as long as we do what we do with friends?

Two penguins who do everything together

Front cover

Fluff and Billy by Nicola Killen arrived last week.  What a cute little book, so cute I had to feature it immediately.  Cute in the sense of being endearing and clever at the same time. And just perfect for pre-school children, with the natural repetition in the verbal text and the expressive illustrations. 

Fluff and Billy are two penguins, great friends, who do everything together. Fluff has red feet and Billy has yellow chest feathers.  The painted font on the cover helps us focus on their different features, highlighting their differences, despite both being penguins. Here they are on the back cover, swimming together under water.  

Back cover

Though red and yellow appear on the front cover, it is blue and yellow which are the two base colours, and white of course.  Yellow introduces us to the two penguins, it appears as we open the paperback version of this picturebook in a recto page splatted with yellow paint, followed by a further spread, a yellow background with an oval window showing the two penguins, wings touching as though holding hands. 

Opening 1

The copyright page brings us the blue, that deep sea we saw on the back cover.  The two penguins are speeding forward into the book and a splat of blue slap bang in the middle of the title page repeats the front cover combination of these three words, "Fluff and Billy", the birds' names written with a paintbrush and brought together with an "and" written in Times Roman(?), the rest of the title is also in the same font. 

Copyright and title page

The play between these two font types continues within the picturebook pages.  The paint brush font represents the birds' voices and the other the narrator's.  You may also have noticed that Fluff's font is slightly darker than Billy's. 

Let's begin ... as though we haven't already!

Opening 2

I think this is one of my favourite spreads.  Look at the movement! Those blue foot prints on the verso spread  pushing us upwards as the penguins rush up the snowy hill and then zooming down the hill following the bluey dots as the penguins slide on their bellies.  The font slopes up and down too, and the verbal text comes twice each time, first it's Fluff, then it's Billy.  Each doing the same thing, so their voices repeated. As the mediator you can use slightly different voices too. Then ...

Opening 3

Aaaaaaa!  Aaaaaaa!  Now that looks fun. Lines and dots again showing movement and that crack in the ice on verso once again pushing our gaze across the spread.  Those splodges of yellow just adding a touch of sparkle to the page. 

Fluff and Billy go swimming, "I'm swimming" they both say; then splashing.  Fluff runs here and Billy runs here. 

Opening 6

Fluff jumps up and so does Billy, but woah!  That is one big jump, shown in the illustrations (we can only see his legs as he jumps out of the page!) but also the way the font has been turned on its side and is whooshing up, following Billy off that page. 

Opening 7

We see the result on the next spread.  Fluff looks worried as Billy lands on his head, those yellow splodges falling around him and things change, Fluff rolls a snowball, but Billy throws one ... right at Fluff. But that's not right, don't they always do the same thing?
"'Ouch!" cried Fluff".  On the next three spreads, we see the two friends sitting back to back, but apart, one on each side of the spread, separated first by the penguins words, "I'm not talking to you".  Their feelings are so visible, from their postures, the way their heads are tilted upwards.  They are as frosty as the snow around them.  

Opening 9

On the next spread it is the narrator who reinforces the point: "Fluff said nothing." "Billy said nothing." The penguins don't look quite so haughty.  Then ...

Opening 11

No need for words, we all know how both these penguins are feeling. And so Fluff tickles Billy, and Billy tickles Fluff. 

Opening 13

And they laugh ... "together!"  Yellow and blue in soft floating shapes. Friends again. 
But that's not the end, remember that yellow spread at the beginning of the book, well here it is again, but this time the penguins are leaving, wings touching, rushing off into more adventures. 

Spread 14

One of the cleverest picturebooks I've seen in a while: it's visually exciting and tells a real story, one of friendship, falling out and making up. The illustrations provide brilliant examples of emotions for children to see and talk about. And, as an added bonus, everything gets said twice!  Love it, love it, love it. A MUST for all early years English classrooms. 

Sausages, sausages, sausages!

Front cover

At the beginning of November I wrote about a book called The Cloud, which is published by Child's Play.  They were really happy about my post and wrote and told me so.  They were the first publishers to actually notice I was writing about their books, so I congratulated them!  In return, they sent me a small selection of their latest titles, which was really nice - my first experience of getting books for free and it felt wonderful!  I didn't get a buzz from all the books they sent, but I did like this one, Star Gazer's Skyscrapers and extrardinary SAUSAGES by Claudia Boldt (I'll be featuring at least one more in later posts).   I like sausages and I love dogs, so that's a great help as it's a book which features a fat, sausage-loving dog and his owner! I also knew that Claudia Boldt had been nominated a Book Trust Best Illustrator of 2011, so it was good to get a look at this new talent first hand. 

The front cover shows us one of the main characters, Frank, the fat, sausage-loving dog.  He's got a Labrador look to him, and I instantly liked his podgyness (I have a naturally podgy black Labrador of my own, her ears woggle just like Frank's do, and she also enjoys a sausage or two!). I am already making all sorts of personal connections with this front cover, that's a good sign! If we look at the back cover, it does what I like picturebooks to do: shows one continuous illustration, and it presents the other half of this dog-owner-duo, Henrietta (her name is written in the blurb).  She's swinging dangerously from something as sausages float by beneath her.  

Back and front covers

This image together with the title leaves you wondering, what are we going to find inside? 

Endpapers show us all that is a sausage, fresh and smoked ... alongside icereams and sundaes. 

Endpapers

Curioser than ever, what is this book about?

There's a lovely "This book belongs to..."page in the forematter. Henrietta teasing Frank with a sausage. Then the title page has a little illustration of a loving dog licking his owner, a cross-eyes owner! 

Title page

This illustration actually leads us into the main body of the picturebook ...

Opening 01

... for the first opening is Henrietta's reaction to an over affectioante dog, "Careful Frank!  Don't knock my ice-cream!" This is when we disocver that she likes ice-cream and wants to make ice-creams when she grows up.  And what about Frank? 

Opening 02

A sausage dog of course! It's that image from the front cover, "I want to make sausages, eat sausages, do sausages.  Sausages, sausages, sausages."  And so we have our dilemma, Frank wants sausages and nothing but sausages.  Henrietta continues with ideas of what she would like to do when she grows up.  She wants to climb "the steepest skyscrapers, up amongst the ice-cream clouds."  But Frank wants sauasges.  She wants to be a lighthouse keeper ... "I could flash the light, while you guide the ships safely out to sea!" 

Opening 05

Frank wants sausages... "Sau-sea-ges, splash!"  Lovely sausage fish all over the place, lucky Frank! Can you see Henrietta swinging from the lighthouse in the background. 

Henrietta would like to be a star gazer, on a mission to Mars.  

Opening 06

This is a wonderful spread.  We can see Henrietta and Frank in different poses.  Flaoting together in the distance and whizzing by, Henrietta on a shooting star and Frank on Space-sa-ges!  There's a constellation of stars too... the Canis Major maybe?

When Henrietta is a super dancer, so is Frank, for he dances "Sass-se-ages, siss-se-ges, sou-sa-ges, and salsa-ges."   She's a queen bee and poor Frank is a worker, no sausages in this spread.  Finally she decides she's going to be a mechanic, and Frank is her assistant. 

Opening 09

But all he can say is "Sausages!". Henrietta has had enough.  So has Frank. 

Opening 10

That's a grumpy looking dog!  He's right, they have nothing in common. So they sit and grump at opposites ends of the page: Henrietta slurps her icecream and Frank chomps his sausage.     And that's when Henrietta has an idea. Can you guess what it is?

Opening 12

WOW!  Ice-cram sausages and sausage ice-cream!  Hooray!  A spread full of yummy sausage ice-creams and ice-cream sausages.  

Crazy story!  But I really like its quirkiness, and I think children will too, (I still have to try it out in the classroom).   How many of us have tiffs with our friends, when they won't do what we want to do?  This little story demonstrates what great solutions we can all come to. And what fun primary children can have thinking what they'd like to be when they grow up, and why not have some wild ideas, just like Henrietta? 

Thanks again to Child's Play for  sending me this picturebook.