Hansel and Gretel

Many readers will be familiar with Impey’s lively retellings of popular traditional stories either from the original collection, The Orchard Book of Fairy Tales or, embellished with Peter Bailey’s expressive line drawings, the small book editions of individual tales. Clearly the publishers have targeted this big book version at teachers wanting literacy hour texts, as inside the front cover is a plethora of teaching and learning activities for use ‘within and beyond the Literacy Hour’ aimed at Years 1, 2 or 3.

Certainly some of the ideas, for example from the ‘shared text work’ or ‘individual and group activities’ are worth pursuing but surely we did those things long before the advent of the literacy hour and would anyone really want to trivialise this powerful tale by focusing on the ou phoneme or generating est rhymes? And when will children have time to discuss feelings and emotions – either theirs or those of the characters?