The muted tones speak to the normalacy of this place at an such an extraordinary time; flashes of red and pink seem banners of hope and fear, respectively. Lastly turn to the two page spread which shows the population of the town fleeing towards the end of the war. Which makes this a good classroom/homeschool book for introducing the Holocaust to school-age children.

Innocenti, who hails from Italy, was the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration in 2008, an award which is presented every other year to both a living author and to an illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children's literature. Explain that before June 1941, Hitler had said he was a friend of Russia but all the time he was secretly preparing to launch a surprise attack.The text would be a good resource to use when studying world war 2 as I think that the images would be a good discussion point that the teacher could build onto. When all the tables are complete, ask different pairs to talk through their answers for a particular image or clip, inviting comments from the rest of the class and transferring agreed details on to a whole class version of the table e. In one picture, the girl is crossing a bridge with water underneath her (in which she refers to as a mirror).

What Rose Blanche witnesses is limited, so the story is disjoint of course, but the mood is very dark and probably better suited for an adult audience. Take suggestions from groups before revealing details from the teacher's notes from the folder in turn. Although I thought this was a lovely and poignant story, I wonder whether children of picture-book age would find it as interesting.

Ofsted watched one of my lessons and couldn’t believe how much Year 6 had learnt through embodying Rose in this way. Ian McEwan is the author of two collections of stories and twelve previous novels, including Enduring Love, Amsterdam, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1998, Atonement and, most recently, Solar. The range of dates could be displayed around the classroom allowing the teacher to descibe events moving from date to date in turn while also referring to the map already on show. The child reader may empathise with either the young boy feeling scared or with Rose as a concerned bystander.