The New Neighbours

Ooh what a treat to receive a book telling us more about Vern and Lettuce. This is a colourful story featuring the aforementioned friends – a sheep and rabbit respectively – but even better we meet more of their friends in Sarah McIntyre’s distinctive rounded happy open drawings.

The book basically passed the hardest test of a whole school assembly. To explain, this means all ages are looking the right way and absorbed in the story. In this case they certainly were.

The story begins with the news that rats have moved in to the apartment. Lettuce and her fellow rabbits are very excited about this and eager to tell all the other flat owners so they start their journey from the top of the apartments and knock on Vern’s door. Vern is not quite as excited by the rats’ presence as the rabbits but joins them to go down the next set of stairs to tell the next set of neighbours. The feeling about the rats then starts to change and by the time the animals have managed to troop to the bottom of the apartment block they are well and truly worked about about the rats.

As you can imagine there is a super twist and wonderful picture to stop them in their tracks. That picture really tickled all the children in assembly – so much so that they wanted to tell all the teachers in school about it too. The children were drawn to the rounded and fantastically expressive features of all the characters in the book- in assembly terms they are also bold enough to share the book. The speech bubbles and use of different font size add to the story by ensuring the children participate and think about how the characters would say these words. Repeating and adding to the language as the animal entourage expanded was worked really well – it’s a must for reading out loud and sharing.

Sarah is well known in our school for creating pesky sea monkeys but most of all for those popular ‘pugs of the frozen north’ but I think now there are some new favourites in school with Lettuce, Vern and friends (including rats!).