The Bear Under The Stairs

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Her books have been translated into 30 languages and won many awards including the Library Association Kate Greenaway Medal – twice. Although the book is full of beautiful (sometimes scary) illustrations and visual descriptions, I thought it was a very difficult story for young children to make sense of.

This is what the story builds up for the audience to believe but then we are contradicted once again and the existence of the bear is confirmed. Helen Cooper is a significant and prolific author who won the Kate Greenaway award twice for two consecutive books.

The repetitive language ‘wham, bang, thump’ is also a fun way to encourage children to join in with the reading.

Find out what happens when a nastly smell pervades the house and Mum and William decide to investigate . William thinks he sees a bear that lives in the closet under the stairs and he keeps his eyes closed whenever he's near the closet. Overall I think that this would be a good book to read aloud to young students and could get a few "ohh's" and "aww's" during story time. As a child I personally believed that the bear in the story was a figment of Williams’s imagination.

He is scared of this bear, then eventually goes to look under the stairs with his mother to find there is no bear.