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’. Use Remember, remember and say this together. Continue to learn the two rhymes from last week: Penny for the Guy and Fireworks. 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: More characters, more locations, more animations, more stories, more h-content, and more magic are coming your way! Look again at Let’s Celebrate 5 Days of Diwali and look at Day 3. The little clay pots to hold the candles are called divas. Talk about how we use candles in our homes/lives.

As for the text, this is a story in which the words build upon themselves, and I tend to find these irritating if there is too much text to read over and over again. Regardless of how much children like it, so often it’s an adult co-reader who has the arduous task of reading these stories, and I have seen some particularly bad examples in my time, one of which recently ended up in the bin. Share the story Rama and Sita on the IWB. Remind children that these names were in ‘ Let’s Celebrate….’ That we read last week. 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.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).

Look again at Rama and Sita on the IWB. Remind children of the ending. People lit divas in their homes to celebrate the return of Rama & Sita. Now they light divas to remember. 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! This is almost but not quite a wordless picture book. Because there are so few words — and even fewer distinct words — the illustrations carry the vast majority of the story. 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 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.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 But, as with any great adventure, the first victory is only the beginning of new, even greater challenges! Ahead of us is work on version 0.2.1. and it's anything, but an easy walk! But that doesn't scare us. 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. Anyone who has helped an emergent reader with assigned readers knows the difference between an interesting early reader and a ‘slog’. Bears In The Night by the Berenstains is an early reader with a focus on positional words. This book is an example of a successful early reader because the story is engaging and children will want to return to its fun creepiness over and over. This is achieved by: 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: