After hearing the story a few times, children will get to know it well. Encourage them tell it to you in their own words, with some words or phrases from the story, using the pictures to help them. Things to make and do Storyplay The Yorkshire countryside heavily inspired Pat Hutchins artwork. When she was a little girl, a couple gifted her a sketchbook where she would draw, and chocolate was the reward for her illustrations.

Use boxes, cushions and blankets and any other suitable props to create the world of the farmyard to go on a walk, going across, around, over, past, through, and under. Children can tell the story as they go on their journey. They might like to make up their own story about going for a walk in a different place, such as a forest or a house. Make a flap book At the same time, the audience is being offered three different ways of relating to the book: [they] may be a superior subject, a cooperative subject, or a subjected subject, depending on the answer to the following questions. Is the narrating voice as oblivious as Rosie to the fox’s presence? Is the narrator in collusion with the audience, sharing a joke about the story? Or is the narrator teasing the audience? Children’s Fiction by John Stephens Rosie’s Walk Teaches Humour Take note of the line within the pictures — this technique was used a lot in the 1970s, and give the story a distinctly retro feel: This is not just hatching to define form — the lines within the shapes are decorative. Rosie the Hen went for a walk I’m Mouse is another picture book consisting of a single sentence for a very young audience. STORY SPECSMuch of the fun of Rosie’s Walk is the fact that the pictures come in pairs. In each pair, the f irst picture shows the fox about to get himself into physical difficulty, and the second shows the result of the movement forward implied by the first. Notice how each tile of the roof is clearly defined and individually drawn. Cylindrical form is given to the milk pails by horizontal, well-defined lines. Rosie’s feathers are ornamental. To off-set all of this ornamentation, it was a good choice to make use of white space for the ground and sky — a popular choice in similar styles of work. (See Mercer Mayer’s early work. Later he seems to have either grown tired of the ornamental style or discarded it when switching to digital, as his ornamental line turns into air-brushed fills which have more obviously been digitally rendered.) Perry Nodelman points out the paradox that both intensely patterned and intensely disrupted visual surfaces convey relatively less narrative information, and that a book such as Rosie’s Walk verges on the merely decorative.

On a large sheet of paper, using pencils or pens in similar colours to the book, children can draw the farmyard as a storymap. They can look at the pictures in the book to help them but not copy them. Using small toys as Rosie and the fox, children can tell the story in their own words. To begin, you could start moving the hen around the farmyard and telling Rosie’s story, with children moving the fox toy to tell the fox’s story. Act it out Educator asks probing and clarifying questions to highlight the importance of the Controller only doing exactly what s/he is instructed to do, and of the Programmer making sure instructions are clear and precise. Age 0-5 Rosie the hen sets off for a walk around the farmyard, closely followed by an accident-prone fox. Rosie seems unconcerned and we are left to wonder if she knows the danger she’s in or is cleverly leading the fox into trouble. Rosie’s Walk is a perfect book to help young readers learn to read. The distinctive illustrationshelp children to predict what happens next in the story.

More Book Activities

This book is great for working on positional words. The activities below will reinforce this vocabulary Rosie’s Walk Activities

Understanding the World: This Science: Seasonal Changes (Spring and Summer) resource helps children to identify signs of Spring, through science learning outside. Children might be looking out for things like environmental changes, such as the weather. Or, animals and plants, where they can be taught about lots of biology aspects. Children can even learn all about the life cycle of a hen ! First, the fox in midair, about to land on a rake; second, the rake hitting the fox in the face. First, the fox about to leap on Rosie; second, the fox in the pond he has not noticed. In choosing these two particular sorts of moments, Hutchins implies an entire sequence of actions; she has selected those moments that best suggest movement forward or the consequences of previous actions. In focusing on the unexpected results of the fox’s action, furthermore, these pairs of pictures constantly reveal how the fox is as unconscious of his surroundings as is Rosie herself: she may have no eyes for foxes, but foxes appear to have no eyes for rakes and ponds. These pairs of pictures create mood as well as meaning. Their repetitive rhythm gives the story the detached feeling of a series of jokes rather than the evolving intensity of a plot; we can laugh as our familiarity with the pattern develops because we know the story is going to keep going through variations of the same situation rather than moving forward toward a climax. Perry Nodelman, Words About PicturesAfter gaining a scholarship to Darlington School of Art, then attending Leeds College of Art, where she continued with illustration, she moved to New York with her husband, where she began to work on her first book Rosie’s Walk. Become a VIP member of the Growing Book by Book community. It’s free. And, get the Rosie’s Walk Activities as a thank you gift. Set Up: Print the b&w printables for each student. Print a color set for classroom use and laminate for durability if desired. If a picture in which one color predominates strongly suggests a particular mood, then so does a picture that leaves out one particular color. The pictures in Rosie’s Walk seem so peaceful and unthreatening not just because of their style but also because they contain yellow and red and even green, but no blueat all. Perry Nodelman, Words About Pictures

Read the story again and leave spaces for children to join in with the story. They can add their own responses to the dramatic events. Tell the story Can you turn a workaday tale into a scary one, or vice versa? For example, Mary Had A Little Lamb might not be a lamb at all, but a gigantic fluffy monster. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star would be quite different if a child astronaut were looking at earth from a futuristic space craft. Humpty Dumpty would take on a different mood altogether if ‘Humpty Dumpty’ were a child pushed off a wall by bully classmates. SEE ALSO Further, because individual pictures do not have grammar, syntax or linear flow, but freeze specific moments in time, rarely presenting more than one event within a single frame, this relationship between text and picture is one between differently constructed discourses giving different kinds of information, if not different messages. Hence the audience will experience a complicated process of decoding, so that a text which by itself is a series of inconsequential events structured as a language lesson, and as such might be expected to strive for clarity and precise, single meaning, becomes only a surface beneath which other kinds of meaning can be perceived, and meaningfulness itself becomes problematic.The last sheet can be used for students to illustrate each positional word in the boxes Rosie’s Walk Activity Printables