Make sure before you begin to read that the seating is such that all the children can actually see the illustrations. Or a pirate and ship for Shiver me Timbers or My First Encyclopedia with a series of objects labelled with the first letter. There are eleven different books in this story, and my first idea was to have eleven different illustrators – one for each book-within-a-book! The same applies to native speakers as well which is why classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or fairy tales like Goldilocks and the Three bears are so popular with children. To quote from The Scotsman it’s 'a glorious celebration of books and reading' and in an English classroom the possibilities are endless.

You could group together like-minded readers and together they decide why they all like that particular type of book. The book itself includes an extended range of verbs in the past tense such as ‘curled up’, ‘read’, ‘found’, ‘cried’, ‘went’, ‘told’, ‘shook’, ‘jumped’, ‘built’, ‘chose’, ‘saw’, ‘waved’, ‘stole’, ‘caught’… This is just a selection. The best part about this book is that each character in their individual stories is reading a book, so in essence one character is reading about the next until we eventually work our way back to Charlie. They could draw their own picture from the book they find the most interesting from Charlie’s collection.You can teach them language they need to express how they feel about a book they love with a few key adjectives.

They could then make up their own titles – you could allocate one book to one group if time is an issue, if not it could be interesting to compare the different titles the groups come up with.

For language learners they are all the more important as they can guide a learner to a better understanding of the language they are listening to. They could do this on their own with the first listening and then put any words they have written down onto the board. What’s particularly clever about this cover is that the book that Charlie is reading is in fact the very one you are going to read to the children. Once you have spent some time with the inside double-paged illustration you can then ask the children to match the individual characters to the books on the book shelf. You could select a few from throughout the book and get the class to tell you which story they hear the verb in.