Are wolves good and little or big and bad? Find out here, with a twist in the tail. This is the kind of book that delights parents as well as children, and I'm grateful to Professor Martin Salisbury, who taught the author/illustrator on his MA course at Anglia Ruskin University, for introducing it in a talk to the Friends of Linton Library. Look out for him again at Linton Children's Book Festival, 10th-11th May next year - a wonderful man and a wonderful course.
Here's another,
A rather poorly behaved dog who hears the same word so often he thinks it's his name. Rather like the pupil Veronica Keenan told me about, who said her name was "Shut up Samantha". Marta Altes, another student of Professor Salisbury, finds another clever twist at the end.
Children's books like these have lots of qualities, but in teaching terms they help children make the leap from books that are designed to be regular and supportive, such as reading schemes, to books where words follow the normal patterns of language, with irregular and regular patterns occuring where they happen to fall. Adapting to this mix of regular and irregular patterns is a key skill in learning to read in English, and one that deserves much more attention - using phonics will give a child the basis of learning to read, but reading in real life demands an understanding of what happens when phonics don't tell us all we need to know.
Books £4.50 each from Amazon.