Quick as a Cricket [木板书]

A celebration of a child's growing self-awareness, and a prime example of how books can contribute to this.

Publisher Comment
Because Mrs. Honey's dream is so much like the dreams we really have, it will encourage children to talk about their own dreams. We can help them to see that the bizarre series of events that often characterize their dreams is actually quite typical of dreaming. The common elements of dreaming, flying, falling, being trapped, drowning, incongruous circumstances and waking suddenly in the middle of a crisis, are all part of Mrs. Honey's dream.

Mrs. Honey's cat, Thomas, knows what happened to the dream pirates - they got rid of them by waking up. Children should always be reassured of that, as real and often overwhelming and frightening as dreams may seem, they exist only in our minds and are gone when we wake. At the same time, exploring links between our dreams and our feelings can be fun and can help us to understand ourselves better.

Suggest that children make up their own dream-like story and enter it in the "Dream a story Competition" described at the end of the book.

Children will like the colourful vocabulary. Words like, "enormous, glaring, rabble, rigging, cutlasses, bellowed, sneered, and collapsed" show the respect Child's Play has for children's capacity to enjoy and use a high quality of language.