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! 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. 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. Or a pirate and ship for Shiver me Timbers or My First Encyclopedia with a series of objects labelled with the first letter.

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. This will not only help them brainstorm ideas about what they may be about to listen to, it will also arouse their interest. You could group together like-minded readers and together they decide why they all like that particular type of book.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. 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. 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. 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. They can listen again and see if they find any other words which rhyme with their word bank they had previously compiled.

Make sure before you begin to read that the seating is such that all the children can actually see the illustrations.

You could photocopy miniatures of this page and they could cut and stick onto the survey poster the book cover they like the best.

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. To quote from The Scotsman it’s 'a glorious celebration of books and reading' and in an English classroom the possibilities are endless. 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. You could select a few from throughout the book and get the class to tell you which story they hear the verb in. You could provide them with a few key words such as ‘ghosts’, ‘country’, ‘encyclopedia’, ‘fairy tales’ and ‘thieves’.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. I’ve then used an example of one of my favourite books ‘Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book’ and given ideas on how you could best exploit it with your young learners. But the publisher thought that would be too complicated, and Axel has done a great job making each book look different. They could do this on their own with the first listening and then put any words they have written down onto the board. They could learn about different types (genres) of books and complete an updated version of the earlier class chart and see if they all still prefer the same genre of book as before.

Once you have spent some time with the inside double-paged illustration you can then ask the children to match the individual characters to the books on the book shelf. For language learners they are all the more important as they can guide a learner to a better understanding of the language they are listening to. They could draw their own picture from the book they find the most interesting from Charlie’s collection. 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. You can spend a whole lesson just with the double spread of pictures of Charlie’s books on his bookshelf.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.