Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis

Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis Tadpole’s Promise by British award-winning author Jeanne Willis (ISBN: 9781783445868) is an ironic story with a little bit of dark humour. This unorthodox picture book – Smarties Silver Award Winner – is sure to cause a few laughs!

The day Tadpole and Caterpillar meet, they fall in love. Caterpillar makes Tadpole promise that he’ll never change, but circumstances beyond his control cause him to not only break that promise, but break Caterpillar’s heart. She crawls up the willow branch and cries herself to sleep, just to undergo a transformation of her own. Her love for Tadpole remains, but will they find one another again?

It is a zany, unpredictable picture book in vertical format – a clever arrangement to separate the land & sky from the underwater scenery, where a humorous “side story” evolves in the illustrations while portraying more of the stages of development of the frog.

It is a brilliant story for 4-5 year olds, but older kids also benefit from reading it, opening discussion about a few topics. And that’s what we did at our Book Club Hour at Thorntree Prep this morning, learning about

  • research and non-fiction books
  • different genres of fiction and non-fiction books
  • how to do research using non-fiction books (introducing the Table of Contents, Index Pages, Page numbers, Asterisk & references, plagiarism, citation)
  • metamorphosis, habitats and life-cycles
  • change and adaptability
  • keeping promises
  • forgiveness

 
 
 
 

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