Personal experience 

I've only recently read this book. A great friend of mine, who I met through teaching, asked me for some teaching ideas around this book. When I said I'd never read it, she gasped the gasp all book lovers do so I ordered it and it did not disappoint. 

Summary 

The narrative is a modern fable. The story opens with a young street urchin picking the pockets of ‘mean, hard people’ who live in the ‘mean hard city’. One day she tries to mug an old lady, who turns out to have an unexpected strength and refuses to hand over her bag. Until she says, ‘If you promise to plant them, I’ll let go.’ The girl promises and later discovers she has a bag of acorns. She keeps her promise planting by the rubbish tips, the railway lines, the choked up roads, and soon the city starts to transform

Before reading

The title of this book is an excellent discussion starter. What is a promise? What happens if you break a promise? How do promises change as we get older? What are your experiences with promises? I love these pre-read discussion sessions because children often find themselves falling into all types of debates and it really gets them talking. As stated in the NC, 'Spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing.' so the more talking the better in my opinion. After our discussion, we will move onto how the front cover connects to the title. Why do you think this image was chosen as the front cover? What are your initial impressions? From there, we make a few observations, connect a few things together and then write a good old prediction. 

The big read

Since the images are just as important as the text, I always find a way to project it onto my IWB be that via scanning the book or using a visualiser. I've only worked in a couple of schools where they fortunately had the budget for multiple copies of the text so scanning is usually my go to. I love the vocabulary in this book and my working walls are always covered in phrases from the text which I do some lovely vocabulary sessions on later down the line. I usually read this book in one session but I like to pause at the line "I just wanted the bag, so I said, “All right, I promise.” where we discuss as a class whether or not the thief is being sincere. 

The pictures

Laura Carlin is a fantastic illustrator. I love how childlike, yet sophisticated, the images are in this book.  She is so creative in the ways she manages to convey meaning to the reader – colour starts to ooze into the pages the more the girl spreads the ‘promise’, animals appear on numerous pages to remind us of life beyond ourselves and even the mugging is done in the shadows to ‘protect’ our character from the true shame of her act. I often encourage the children in my class to learn more about illustrators and their illustrative techniques and style. For the images in the book Laura has used watercolour, pastels and pencil. As a cross curricular art session, we took images from the book and tried to replicate them. I then took the children into the playground where they sketched the 'dullest parts' of the playground and added vibrant colours to create a contrasting piece. 

Reading and writing sessions

I like to spend 3 weeks (15 sessions) on this book where I teach the reading session and follow on with a writing session. It varies from school to school whether their reading text is the same or different to their writing text. I like to chop and change but for this text, I like to use it for both. 

For my reading sessions, this text is perfect for teaching children about impressions. By that I mean character impressions, setting impressions and relationship impressions. Inference. I've spoken to a lot of teachers who find teaching this skill tricky so I always direct them to this text because the characters display a range of personality traits that are excellent bases for children to refer back to when facing these types of questions. When I use a picture book for my reading text, I always make sure that at least two of my sessions come away from the text and I'll use a poem or non-fiction text instead. I will always link the texts to the original book for example, I might choose a non-fiction text on the environment or a poem about street life. This way, I can keep a similar theme but expose my children to different text types.

For my writing sessions, I love to explore the language in this text: The gritty wind still scratched the parched, cracked streets. The people scowled and scuttled to their homes like cockroaches. It's great for revising figurative language devices. During one vocabulary session, we looked at synonyms and antonyms and created a 'synonym city' and an 'antonym city' based on the city's description of being 'mean and hard and ugly'. This was a nice activity to deepen our vocabulary knowledge through using a thesaurus as well as revising the terms 'synonym and antonym'. For longer writing sessions, we wrote a balanced argument as to whether the thief should be cleared of her crime. This was an excellent writing session and one which the children really enjoyed. The writing outcomes from this book are endless and that's why it's a top hit for me.