Charlie Cook's Favourite Book: 1

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You can teach them language they need to express how they feel about a book they love with a few key adjectives. If a book excites you and catches your interest then it is more likely to be a winner – if only because you will be more enthusiastic when you’re reading it.

You could photocopy miniatures of this page and they could cut and stick onto the survey poster the book cover they like the best. They could then make up their own titles – you could allocate one book to one group if time is an issue, if not it could be interesting to compare the different titles the groups come up with. They could draw their own picture from the book they find the most interesting from Charlie’s collection.You can spend a whole lesson just with the double spread of pictures of Charlie’s books on his bookshelf.

The front cover of the book, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, shows Charlie sitting, reading a book whilst surrounded by the characters in his favourite books. To quote from The Scotsman it’s 'a glorious celebration of books and reading' and in an English classroom the possibilities are endless. Make sure before you begin to read that the seating is such that all the children can actually see the illustrations. They can listen again and see if they find any other words which rhyme with their word bank they had previously compiled. The book itself includes an extended range of verbs in the past tense such as ‘curled up’, ‘read’, ‘found’, ‘cried’, ‘went’, ‘told’, ‘shook’, ‘jumped’, ‘built’, ‘chose’, ‘saw’, ‘waved’, ‘stole’, ‘caught’… This is just a selection.But the publisher thought that would be too complicated, and Axel has done a great job making each book look different. The same applies to native speakers as well which is why classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or fairy tales like Goldilocks and the Three bears are so popular with children. If you don’t have their undivided attention to begin with it will be a hard slog to get their attention while reading and you will spoil the experience for those who are trying to listen when you stop to tell others to listen.

You need to be clear, find the right pace and know which words you will need to emphasize to help bring the story to life.

They could do this on their own with the first listening and then put any words they have written down onto the board. You could group together like-minded readers and together they decide why they all like that particular type of book. You could always suggest it to your school as they may have only considered the use of text books and may be open to the use of real storybooks in class.

What’s particularly clever about this cover is that the book that Charlie is reading is in fact the very one you are going to read to the children. The best part about this book is that each character in their individual stories is reading a book, so in essence one character is reading about the next until we eventually work our way back to Charlie. There are eleven different books in this story, and my first idea was to have eleven different illustrators – one for each book-within-a-book! If you don’t have the luxury of moving tables, chairs or even children then have at least the ritual of clearing desks and so creating a change in the pace of the lesson.You could find out what sort of book they want to talk about and arrange the groups so that you have a selection of book types.