The Carrot Top Mystery ¦ The Great Egg Mystery

At first sight these are typical supermarket birthday-present-from-friend's-mother books.

Each contain a mystery of one sort (the missing carrot tops) or another (Dilly Duck's three missing eggs) which the characters have to solve by following a trail of clues. The twist is that the reader lays the trail, furnishes the houses, and plants the gardens, by means of stickers placed on the pages as instructed by the story.

How to try this out in a class context? Although the stickers are described as 're-usable' they plainly are not. In the end, I pegged the books on my easel and let the whole class decide where to put the stickers and what the clues meant as I read the story.

To my surprise this was a highly successful activity. It generated an enormous amount of discussion and debate and the children really enjoyed the decision making and the opportunity to participate in the process of story making.

As a result, of course, the children were keen to read the books for themselves and it was here that they were less successful. The books are American in origin and the text was not natural to my children. Furthermore, once the stickers are in place the instructions for their placement intrude oddly in the story. However, there is no denying that many children thoroughly enjoyed these books.

They are not great literature, the story is plainly a formula and one that children will soon tire of, but as a class cooperative activity they have more to them than meets the eye.