Trick or Treat?

Who doesn't love a spooky, seasonal story when the leaves are falling and the nights are drawing in? Trick or Treat is the perfect, silly bedtime story with just enough spook to thrill younger readers and a clever twist to make older ones smile.

A witch is preparing a potion in her spooky house; an important potion to help her sniff out any lurking ogres. Sadly she's missing a key ingredient, but the day is saved when an adorable little girl knocks on the door looking for some trick or treat sweets. The witch invites her in and the little girl is impressed by the sheer witchiness of the house and the whole 'halloween display'. It's only when she's enticed to climb into the cauldron as the final potion ingredient do we finally find out what the real trick has been all along....

As well as cracking bedtime story, this is a great book for use in school. Perfect as a stimulus for Early Years settings, whose messy kitchens have been transformed into potion-making stations this month. Who can invent a potion for detecting if a werewolf is on the prowl or if a vampire is waiting to come in?

For older children this is a good introduction to the craft of spell-writing. That zombie potion? What ingredients do you need? Which order should they be added in? How many times do you stir the cauldron and do you stir it widdershins or sunwise (anti-clockwise or clockwise)? Perhaps a Reception child could show the scribe what ingredients they chose and how they made the potion, then the scribe writes it down and draws some diagrams to create a class spell book.

There are so many different possibilities to develop oracy, communication, vocabulary, writing for a purpose, instructional writing, command verbs, sequential ordering.... If you bring maths into play as well, you can ask the older children to help measure quantities of dry and wet ingredients, using standard and non-standard units; half a snailshell of owl tears? How about 100g of desiccated fairy wings? Again, limited only by imagination.

A great book to have in the classroom in the Autumn half term. Highly recommended.

Picture book / Ages 4+ / Reviewed by Wendy Kelly, teacher

Suggested Reading Age 3+