The Bear Under the Stairs is an entertaining, suspenseful, and amusing story that toddlers will certainly enjoy and ask for again. The rhyming is fun and the illustrations adorable, definitely a book that I'll be reading to my own children in the future. It tells the story of William and how he copes with and finally confronts his fear of bears and dark spaces. Fearing the bear will want to eat him if he gets hungry, William brings the bear food every day, tossing it in quickly with his eyes shut tight. For any child with fears of dark places in your own home, this book might help them to see that their fears are all in their imagination.

As the story is told in rhyme and uses alliteration, it is a great way for children to review certain phonemes, particularly different ways to make the /a/ sound. Overall I think that this would be a good book to read aloud to young students and could get a few "ohh's" and "aww's" during story time. Poor William thinks he saw a bear under the stairs, and he figures he can keep it happy by feeding it regularly. e. the name of the various food and fruits that William feeds the bear) is easy to teach with the use of this text. Since then she has written and illustrated a whole lot more including the bestselling 'Pumpkin Soup' ,which is 25 years old this year, and also the others in the series which are 'A Pipkin of Pepper', and 'Delicious'.

Spelling Seeds have been designed to complement Writing Roots by providing weekly, contextualised sequences of sessions for the teaching of spelling that include open-ended investigations and opportunities to practise and apply within meaningful and purposeful contexts, linked (where relevant) to other areas of the curriculum and a suggestion of how to extend the investigation into home learning. The bear under the stairs is centred around a boy named William whom having one day seen a furry figure inside the cellar believes that there is a bear living under his stairs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The only downside is that a few pages do have a dark color scheme that may not be as attractive to younger children. The Bear Under The Stairs is a lovely charming book that I will definitely introduce to children again! Helen Cooper is a significant and prolific author who won the Kate Greenaway award twice for two consecutive books. It also has strong PSHE links, particularly around overcoming fears and speaking to a trusted adult. Her books have been translated into over 25 languages and won many awards including the Smarties Prize children's choice and the Library Association Kate Greenaway Medal - twice.The repetitive language ‘wham, bang, thump’ is also a fun way to encourage children to join in with the reading. I love Helen Cooper: her stories are always thought-provoking and with gorgeously detailed illustrations. A lovely short story with beautiful illustrations about a young boy dealing with a common fear for things lurking in the dark. As a child I personally believed that the bear in the story was a figment of Williams’s imagination.