Varmints

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As the book progresses, and more industrialisation and skyscrapers are built, the imagery gets darker and darker. The story is a little dark and depressing for really young children - although it does have a more uplifting ending! Hopefully through works like this readers of all ages will be encouraged to "nurture a little piece of wilderness" in the best ways.

The illustrations are dark and surreal, but they perfectly capture the sense of loneliness and isolation that the varmint feels. The class are watching the animation of the story alongside this which adds extra information to the story. A collection of KS2 materials to support the teaching of the thought-provoking story of Varmints: Part One by Helen Ward.

Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. Some of the illustrations made me very sad thinking about how dissmal our lives can become when we don't stop for the precious things, people, places in front of us - nature, family, friends, students who have something to share.

This could be the case because the sound of bees has come back but doesn't know what will happen to the environment. Helen Ward won the first Walker Prize for Children’s Illustration and twice won the British National Art Library Award. While the text is self-consciously elliptical, one thing is clear: the blame lies with ‘Others’ who ‘came one day’ from outside, the ‘varmints’ (a variant, we are told, of the word vermin), with THEM. They erect the tall structures, harming their natural world, and going against their own yearnings and instincts while losing a sense of self. This is a three-week Writing Root using the film (which can be found online) and text of Varmints by Helen Ward and Marc Craste.It's also the type of book I would have absolutely loved as a small child (I love it now, too, of course) - at five, six years of age, The Dark Crystal was my favourite movie and it was a dark, menacing tale with sinister creatures, death, violence and adventure. The story of one small creature’s struggle to preserve a world in danger of being lost forever through recklessness and indifference. Maybe someday when life's harsher realities set in they'll appreciate the message in this lovely little book. Awards for Helen's work include The National Art Library Awards 1998 and 2001 for The Hare and the Tortoise and her version of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows in the Templar Classic series, and The National Art Library Award for The Tin Forest.

Here Ward's brief lament for the loss of nature's peace and quiet to rampant urbanization really gets tricked out by elaborate packaging, occasional translucent pages and Craste's hyper-atmospheric digital art. Its album version, entitled And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees, adds an extra fifteen minutes of material and is all the better for it. Both pieces--book and movie--create a dark environment through color and font choice that affect the overall mood and tone of this interesting story. Personally I do feel the narrative was a tad preachy- the demonising of "the others" with their "empty heads" has a rather "holier than thou" feel to it. This fantastic story is great for visual literacy and to promote discussion with many writing opportunities.A variety of themes could be interpreted - loss of natural habitat through urbanisation, loss of identity, societal collapse, Communism(? The soft sounds of bees and birds once "touched and warmed the hearts of those FEW who paused and cared to listen," but that was before the OTHERS arrived with immense skyscrapers and so much noise that all thought was driven away.