Who will they scare now?! Julia Eccleshare's Pick of the Month, September Best-selling Janet and Allan Ahlberg tell a deliciously spooky and ultimately joyful story about all the things skeletons get up in a dark dark night. The Big Skeleton, the Little Skeleton and the Dog Skeleton live in a dark dark cellar at the bottom of a dark dark house. One night they decide to go out and do a bit of frightening …. Instead, they visit some other skeletons and have a lot of fun playing in the park.
Skeletons have never been better playmates than in this vividly illustrated laugh-out-loud picture book. Everyone's favourite postman is now 20 years old and celebrates with a brand new cover look. An irresistible buggy attachment for every baby and their parents! The result is a story with loads to talk about as well as pictures to coo over.
Kate Greenaway Medal winner in Janet Ahlberg's iconic illustrations present a vast array of baby paraphernalia that should be instantly recognisable and absorbing to a young child. The liberal sprinkling of wit and charm will appeal to every adult too! From Janet and Allan Ahlberg, the creators of Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman among numerous others and adapted from their classic picture book, The Baby's Catalogue, this little collection is perfect for babies at any and all times of their busy day for the box contains a number of board books for little hands covering Mornings, Night-times, Toys, Baby, Games, Family, Inside, Outside and Pets.
Are you starting school? How exciting! Following a number of children's first experiences, this picture book takes children right from their very first day to the end of the school year. This reassuring read will support even the most nervous school-starter, exploring each emotion, from fear to excitement, with care. The perfect read to start a conversation about any pre-school nerves, packed with playful illustrations and easy to understand explanations.
This is a book that you'll want to read again and again - far beyond the last day of the school year.
A celebration of babies — their dinners, prams, accidents, gardens, bedtimes and bath times, books , pets and even their Mums and Dads. One of our 'Must Reads'. Fabulous illustrations, wonderful rhyming text with not a word out of place; this is a book that no nursery bookshelf can be without.
Guaranteed to have huge appeal with babies and young toddlers. Each beautifully illustrated page encourages young children to interact with the picture to find the next fairy tale and nursery rhyme character.
You currently have JavaScript disabled in your web browser, please enable JavaScript to view our website as intended. Here are the instructions of how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Allan Ahlberg, a former teacher, postman, plumber's mate and grave digger, is in the super-league of children's writers.
He has published over children's books and, with his late wife Janet, created such award winning picture books as Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman - both winners of the Kate Greenaway Medal. He has also written prize-winning poetry and fiction and lives in Sussex.
For Ahlberg, this balance between words and pictures is precisely what a picture book is about. Or, better still, 'I'll say this and the pictures will say that, which contradicts it. He compares the text of picture books to lyrics of songs, which can only very rarely stand alone on the page as poems. On the page by itself some of it is still wonderful, but it's lacking something. It's a description of an unshowy style of writing that mirrors Ahlberg's modesty about his own talents. But the pair of us were twins in the sense that we both really wanted our books to be good.
So it's as though we took my modest talent and we took Janet's modest talent and we poured it into a tiny page thing. While Ahlberg can now articulate the ingredients of a successful picture book, it never occurred to him and Janet that Peepo! They were too busy getting on with producing the next one; firing off ideas and scribbling roughs for the variety of books for which they are now well known.
There is, he claims, no blueprint. But books are made up like sandcastles: you add stuff and knock it down and change it — and, in fact, you didn't even know you were building a castle at first, you thought you were building a garage. Or you were going to have a cave and instead it turned into a garden full of shells.
His father was a labourer who worked long hours, his mother a cleaner and, by today's standards, his upbringing was tough. While he now believes that he was "dead lucky" to have been adopted at all on the grounds that "almost any child is better off being adopted by the most ordinary, even harsh, family than being in the most well-ordered and loving of institutions" , at the time the discovery only increased Ahlberg's feeling of being "a cuckoo in the nest".
He confesses to acting like a "rather snobby intellectual" around his family as a teenager: "My mum and dad and brother would be watching What's My Line? Growing up in a house with few books, he joined three libraries so that he could have a dozen books out at a time.
But although he dreamed of being a writer, "I couldn't complete a sentence, let alone a page. I remember as a young man reading Brideshead Revisited and thinking: 'Christ, I can't be a writer because it's full of descriptions of trees and flowers, and I don't know the names of any. He doesn't remember many trees or flowers in Oldbury, by the sound of it. Yet it has its hooks in the writer — half the books he has written, from Peepo! He "scraped" into the local grammar school but left at 17 with a couple of science A-levels.
Whether producing whimsical series readers or standalone stories full of tongue-in-cheek witticisms, Ahlberg has become popular with children on both side of the Atlantic. Surprising, given the numerous awards and praise that he has received during his long career, he remains understated about his achievement.
The reason for his success? Pendergast, Sara, and Tom Pendergast, editors, St. James Guide to Children's Writers , 5th edition, St. James Press Detroit, MI , Ward, Martha E.
Booklist , May 1, , p. Del Negro, review of Mockingbird , p. Heppermann, review of Treasure Hunt , p. Parravano, review of A Bit More Bert , p. Publishers Weekly , November 2, , p. Sherman, review of Big Bad Pig , p. Moesch, review of Monkey Do! Kiely, review of Mockingbird , p. Simon, review of Half a Pig , p. Gibson, review of The Shopping Expedition , p.
Teacher Librarian , November, , pp. B8; November 7, , p. Career Children's book author. Monkey Do! Son of a Gun , Heinemann London, England , That's My Baby! One Two Flea! Look out for the Seals! Crash, Bang, Wallop! Put on a Show! Also author of the stage play The Giant's Baby.
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