Ketchup on Your Cornflakes?; I went to the Zoopermarket; Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly!

Nick Sharratt has picked on food and shopping - two areas which fascinate young children - and lifted them into delightful absurdity. The simple concept of split pages in Ketchup on Your Cornflakes? is magic - ketchup in your cornflakes or on your toes, custard on your egg or in your bed? A shiver of horror may well go down the adult's spine but these ideas are irresistible to children. In Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly!, Nick Sharratt points out that you have to be careful where you put your finger because not everything is as it first seems. I went to the Zoopermarket uses the device of illustration for packaging which can be opened to show a line drawing of an animal on top of a photograph of a kind of food. Parents need to be prepared that nothing in their store cupboard will retain the correct name once children have been through this book - families will be beset with Salt and Fin-egar crisps and Roarsberry Ripple Ice Cream - until the craze is over.

Teachers note: Ketchup works brilliantly as an early reader and lends itself to all sorts of work with early phonics as well as sight word retention. Zoopermarket and Jelly, Nelly! work extremely well in the early stages of teaching reading and, later, in showing children how language can be manipulated.