We Love Bears and Nipper McFee

Hey guys, it's Laura, 

Here are the books I read for this post

WE LOVE BEARS

The picture book ‘We Love Bears’ by Catherine and Laurence Antholt is a story about two children on a trip through Teddy Town with their teddy bear. This book is great for young children because the storyline is simple but the text incudes many sight words. Every line in the book rhymes so it gives a great pace to the book. The large and bright images convey what the text is saying well and the descriptions of every place the characters go to is thorough. This text is written in third person and includes speech for the characters. I think that rhyming the lines is a great idea because if children are having trouble reading along they may be able to predict what the second line of the text is. The pictures will also help struggling children because they are very connected to the text. They will be able to use the pictures as a guide to what the text is saying.

This would be a great book in a classroom for introducing poetry. Giving children examples benefits them because they are actually seeing it instead of being told about it. It would also be great for teaching the sounds of certain words. It is interesting to see the amount of words that sound very similar, with just a few letters different, while they mean different things. 

NIPPER MCFEE

This week I read the picture book ‘Nipper McFee – In Trouble with Great Aunt Twitter’ by Rose Impey and Melanie Williamson. This book is a part of a series where the main character, Nipper McFee, get’s himself into different situations and tries to get out of them. Nipper is a scruffy, young cat and the other characters in the story are either cats, dogs or rats. In this story Nipper accidently runs into his great aunt Twitter and she punishes him in different ways. Instead of dealing with the punishment, he tries everything he can think of to get out of it. Along the way, Nipper’s enemies, the basement rats try to sabotage his attempts and he must overcome them as well.

I believe for such a short story there were a lot of characters but they were introduced and described well. The book also uses a lot of comparison and repetition, which I found great because it gave the book a good flow. It would also be easier for children to read because the repetition makes them more familiar with the words used and the comparison gives children images in their head to relate to what Nipper is thinking or feeling.

The pictures in this book completely rely on the text. They are so interrelated that if the text were not present, the story would not make sense. One of the aspects that I found most interesting was that the authors implicated words in the text that were humorous and entertaining because they started with cat.

'Mr Miaowser asked, “Who is that cat-erwauling?"'

'The rats were waiting for him outside, with cat-apults and peashooters!'

'It was a cat-astrophe for Nipper!'

These quirky little add-ins were great because they further immersed the reader into a world with talking cats, dogs and rats. 

That's it for me this time!

Laura