Each Peach Pear Plum

"Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg Each Peach Pear Plum is a personal favourite of mine, because I remember very clearly being introduced to this book as a child, being three years old in my godmother Janice’s house, and seeing this book and hearing it for the first time. Even without looking at the book, you have all the familiar characters in the rhymes that you’ve heard growing up, like Tom Thumb, Mother Hubbard in the cupboard, the three bears and all that. So you’re immediately drawn into the book just by listening to it. And then the art! For me, it really reminds me of the countryside in Scotland where I spent a lot of time on a farm. On the cover you look at the farm with the house in the centre. As a child, looking at each page and finding the clues was just so exciting. It gives me goosebumps and makes my eyes water just thinking about it, because I can still feel the excitement of looking at this book. When I share it with my students and with my daughter, it’s something that they go back to again and again. My first viewing of this book was 37 years ago. I can really remember how magical that was, and I still see that in children today. Definitely, because there’s a lot to observe. For example, Tom Thumb hiding in the tree. Children love that. They love ›things that they can relate to like the family of the bears: mummy, daddy and baby. Baby’s always doing something very cute, like when he’s the last one running behind the tree. And the children follow what happens with the Baby Bunting basket falling down and floating down the river. Another theme in the books that I’ve chosen is that the art is so precise. We underestimate what children see when they look at pictures. The younger the children are, the more we think that they just need bold colours and bright images, which they do enjoy as well. But they really have the most amazing ability to see details that adults don’t see because our heads are full of other things, like what’s for dinner, did I pay that bill?… But as children, they really can get absorbed in the art and that’s where their imaginations go into full-blown action, especially as they get to age four and five when they can really see the pictures and imagine what happened and take that detail somewhere else."