Billy and the Big New School by Catherine & Laurence Anholt

This book by Catherine and Laurence Anholt is about the anxiety that some children feel before starting school for the first time. Billy is quite concerned and worried about the big new school with the great big children. His mum tells him he is just like a litttle bird who doesn't want to leave its nest. Billy loves birds and takes some comfort in this and tells the birds he feeds in the garden all about his worries. That's when he finds a little sparrow who can't fly properly and who is being harassed by other birds. So Billy decides to take him under his human wing. And soon...just as the bird has to go back out into the big skies, so must Billy go to school.  And is school as bad as he thought? Pre-schoolers and adults alike will enjoy sharing and discussing this beautiful picture book with its insight into the joys and trepidations of  starting school.

Daisy and Her Needles by Keith Balding

It's a rhyming couplets poem in a little book of watercolour and gouache paintings which give humour to Daisy the obsessive knitter who knits everything in her life, from a fire to a tree of apples. It's certainly a very woolly existence Even her husband is knitted! A normal flesh and blood husband would quickly become unravelled given her fanatic clicking of the needles.This is indeed a very obscure little book which will take its place on the Little Bookshelf of Little Books in my classroom, for all my students to appreciate or at the very least, wonder about.