Phoebe and the Night Creatures is a much more recent book (also an Australian band) published by Scholastic, and stars a single girl protagonist who is scared to get out of bed to visit the toilet. We would like to say a huge thank you to our patrons! You have no idea how your interest in the game and your kind words motivate our team to keep moving forward! The cover of this book identifies it as being a Beginner Book for Beginning Beginners, which sort of puts me way, way, way out of its category. This book is pretty much designed for people who are learning to read (though surprisingly, there are probably more people my age who are at this level, and have spoken English most of their lives, than the government is willing to admit). Read Let’s Celebrate 5 Days of Diwali up to the end of Day 2. Have any of the children celebrated Diwali? Or do they know others who have. Share the story Rama and Sita on the IWB. Remind children that these names were in ‘ Let’s Celebrate….’ That we read last week.

The illustrator could have created a less engaging picture (though easier to illustrate) by drawing a series of ‘snapshots’. Instead, we see a birds-eye landscape view with compressed perspective. STORY SPECS When you read the book did you notice the white space? Good white space goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it. White breaks up the blue of the night time, and has several other roles here: When illustrating night scenes, many illustrators for children do this by using blue hues rather than darkening the tone. This serves well to create a nightscape which gives the illusion of darkness but without the element of scary — blue hues in bright hues are the ‘night light of picturebook world’.The mother in this story is a distant figure who appears at the beginning of the story and provokes Phoebe to become independent rather than as a comforting figure who appears at the end. Again, the scenery is a nightscape, but set entirely inside a house. Notice how a digital artist portrays night-time and intratext, and how the advent of computers has changed how we illustrate. Like Bears In The Night, Phoebe and the Night Creatures is a story that builds on itself, but in a different way. The climax comes later in the story, so the denouement is shorter. Scary things in picturebooks tend to fall into two categories:

It’s interesting how often mothers perform the comforting role in picturebooks. This story was published in 1971. We are starting to see a few more ‘fathers as comforting figures’ in picturebooks, but they are still few and far between.

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Look again at Bears in the Night. Say that many people are afraid of the dark. Even grown-ups often feel more scared if walking in the dark, or going somewhere strange in the dark. That’s why we have festivals in winter (when it’s dark) to celebrate light – with candles/fireworks We were so excited to show you the completed prologue that we spent a whole month witching our way through it, ignoring trivial things like sleep and weekends! Share Firework Night: The Story of November 5th ( see resources). Discuss how we have fireworks all over England on 5th November. Do some children go to a bonfire party? Or share sparklers. Use Remember, remember and say this together. Continue to learn the two rhymes from last week: Penny for the Guy and Fireworks.