BOOK OF THE WEEK

Our final Book of the Week for this term has been chosen by the Junior Librarian Ariella, from Hawk class. It is not an easy task selecting a book which the librarian believes will appeal to our entire Grimsdell community – from Nursery to Year 2. However, I feel sure that Ariella’s choice will provide a wealth of reading opportunities for all our children.

Ariella recommends Ten Little Unicorns by Mike Brownlow and illustrated by Simon Rickerty.

Ariella’s reason for her choice:

“I love unicorns and I enjoyed this rhyming story – it made it feel like a song!”

Mrs Harvey has no hesitation in recommending Ariella’s choice of book. Mike Brownlow’s Ten Little Collection is a very popular series amongst the Grimsdell children. Ten Little Unicorns is a fun-filled rhyming story, which incorporates counting backwards from ten to one, and is great to share with young children who are learning about numbers. It has a wider appeal too – the pictures are exciting and original and add depth to the text. For Key Stage 1 children, the emphasis would be on the changing fonts utilised by the author and his extensive use of onomatopoeia.

The story is presented in a uniquely creative way – the text covers the page at differing angles and this encourages and challenges children to read in a different way, as well as making it exciting and interactive.It persuades the children to think about the author’s intent – why are certain sentences presented in unusual formats? Similarly, the changing style and size of font add another layer of meaning to the book. Why has the author chosen to use different fonts for the differing characters? In this story, the differing fonts mirror the personalities of the various unicorns. In this particular book there are really excellent examples of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is a literary device in which a word is used to represent a sound. Onomatopoeia helps heighten language beyond the literal words on the page. Its sensory effect is used to create particularly vivid imagery—it is as if you are in the text itself, hearing what the author isenvisaging. Onomatopoeia is a great way for young children to learn the sounds of language because it translates sounds in the world around us to text. In addition, onomatopoeia makes for great fun when reading aloud. You can experiment with tone of voice, volume levels and facial expressions as you discover new sounds.

This book (and others in the series) is available to borrow from our Grimsdell library.

Happy Reading!

Mrs Harvey