The Ish Mother and young readers Eleanor and Ezra enjoyed our recent picture book from The New LiBEARian author Alison Donald and illustrated by Ben Whitehouse:
‘It’s a really fun story – a class of young children are one day visited by a pirate searching for treasure and go off on a little adventure with him to find the loot he’s after. I love how, although the main child character is a boy, the story shows both boys and girls enthusiastically joining in with the adventure.
Eleanor got to the book before me so was the first to test it out. She really enjoyed it, said it was very funny and that her favourite bit was, “the bad pirate who said really funny things!” Being set in a classroom, it’s a really good story for older preschoolers and younger school-age children who could imagine themselves going on an adventure from their own classroom.
When I read it with Ezra there was a lot of enthusiastic arrr-ing going on! As he’s still quite small the story went over his head, but he absolutely loved the pictures – once we had read it, he kept turning the pages over to look at the little details in each spread. I particularly liked how expressive the faces were – even though the illustration style is quite simple, you could still spot a range of different expressions. So as Ezra pointed at the different children I could talk about their emotions – “that girl looks excited! That boy looks a bit scared.”
We really enjoyed ‘Pirates in Classroom 3′ and definitely think it’s one we’ll read over and over – so I’d better improve my dodgy pirate voice!!’
Read the full review here
Buy a copy of the book here