The Mitten

"Yes, you have the very typical scenes of Baba – Grandmother – knitting the mittens for Nikolai. It’s winter outside, and snow. Many children have experienced snow. There’s nothing more magical than that day that you look out of the window or you’re coming home from school, and there’s snow everywhere. I think all children in that weather have had their mother, father or grandmother telling them to keep on their mittens or scarf, telling them to put on their hat. So children immediately relate to that, and to the resistance of a child who just wants to get out into the snow without thinking about the hat or the mittens. In all of Jan Brett’s books, the art is so detailed. In this book I love how, to the side of the main story, you have what’s happened and what’s about to happen. The next animal is coming from the left side of the page. When you introduce children to this book, initially they’re very caught up in the main picture, and it’s normally by the time the third animal is coming that they realise what’s happening in the margin. Then they are able to guess from the picture what’s going to happen next. That just shows how captivating the art is in the main picture of the storybook. Children are attracted to animals and they love the stories about them. This is a fantastic story to teach them about animals, draw attention to different body parts, like the claws on the owl and the prickly spines on the hedgehog, so it’s great for vocabulary-building as well. When choosing books for younger children, very often we choose books that have one or two lines, because we’re not quite sure if they’re going to be able to focus or follow. But actually books with one or two paragraphs per page are perfect for children because it isn’t just about the written word. They’re drawn in by what’s happening on the page, by the art, noticing detail like how the mitten is knitted. They can take so much from that, they can go back and be absorbed in the story and retell the story themselves because the art really brings it alive. The ending is fantastic, when the mouse is on the bear’s nose and the bear sneezes, and at the end Nikolai has one mitten bigger than the other. Children, when they go out and play in the snow, often come back with their belongings in a state, without being quite sure how that happened. This book is a great way of linking their experience to the imagination. Definitely. You might have the occasional child that says that’s impossible, that can’t happen. But most of them just get engrossed in the excitement of how far can we go, how many more animals can you get into the mitten? And they really enjoy the animals and doing activities afterwards, like having their own mitten, putting little toy animals in it, and experimenting with that in the classroom."