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Alice Dalgliesh
I remember this with great nostalgia and it was with that in mind that I read it to my year 3 class at the end of last year. It is a very quiet story and, in family dynamics, feels very much of it's time, the women do all of the cooking and the men go out hunting. It has some lovely descriptions of nature, depicting a quiet peaceable coexistence.
The repetitive nature of the book is where it's beauty really lies, within a few days my class we chanting along as I read. This chanting becomes a key part of the plot, mostly used for reassurance. This clearly still resonates as I found a child in my class chanting it a good month after we had read the book. On the right you can see an image of the chant which the the mother punctuates by cutting out shaped cookies, a scence that always resonated with me. The illustration is beautiful throughout with a distinctive simple style, it would be lovely to do some art with a class around the stylistic trees.
In the acknowledgements Alice Dalgliesh refers to the story as being given to her by a Colonel Henry Shoemaker as a traditional oral story, something very in keeping with it's elements of choral storytelling.
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