Hello Yellow - 80 Books to Help Children Nurture Good Mental Health and Support With Anxiety and Wellbeing - This book demands attention. From the curious creature staring out at the reader on the cover, to its large physical nature and wild typography and breath-taking art, Ward and Marc Craste's creation needs a patient orator and audience. A variety of themes could be interpreted - loss of natural habitat through urbanisation, loss of identity, societal collapse, Communism(?!), enduringly persistent hope and the joy of love - but therein lies the crux of reader response and exploratory talk. Varmints reminds me of Helen Ward's The Tin Forest also. What are we to make of this book? Who does it suggest is to blame for despoiling of idyll there once was? While the text is self-consciously elliptical, one thing is clear: the blame lies with ‘Others’ who ‘came one day’ from outside, the ‘varmints’ (a variant, we are told, of the word vermin), with THEM. This is athree-session spelling seed for the book Varmints by Helen Ward. Below is the coverage from Appendix 1 of the National Curriculum 2014.

The book begins with the sentence, “There was once only the sound of bees and the wind in the wiry grass, the low murmuring of moles in the cool dark earth and the song of birds in the high blue sky.” Could you use this sentence as the starting point for your own story? Look at the use of light and darkness in the illustrations. Could you use a similar style in your own drawings? One of the creatures grows plants in his home. What do plants need to grow? Can you grow some of your own? Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?LoveReading4Kids exists because books change lives, and buying books through LoveReading4Kids means you get to change the lives of future generations, with 25% of the cover price donated to schools in need. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives.

Helen Ward trained as an illustrator at Brighton School of Art, under the direction of well-known children's illustrators such as Raymond Briggs, Justin Todd, Chris McEwan and John Vernon Lord. In 1985, her final year at Brighton, Helen was awarded the first Walker Prize for Children's Illustration.Striking, surreal illustrations and a haunting, evocative text tell a mysterious tale of a threatened natural world, and a hopeful new start.. How does the use of colour change as the story progresses? Could you use this technique in a storyboard for your own story? Armistice Day: A Collection of Remembrance - Spark Interest and Educate Children about Historical Moments But someone is nurturing a little piece of wilderness, and at the right time takes it to the right place... and that little bit of wilderness grows.