Cookie and Friends A

Cookie and Friends A
Vanessa Reilly
Oxford
Review by Alex Case

As the reviews editor Roger Gower can attest, it took me quite a long time to get my review of this pre-school English course down on paper. The cause for my writer’s block is simple to state- this book worked better in my classroom than any of the other books for this age have done but I couldn’t quite work out why. There’s certainly nothing flashy or new about the book that you can point out as its secret, it just seems to do the simple things well. So, simple and effective would be how I would sum it up. In fact, it has entirely renewed my faith in using textbooks with this age group, if only by more or less doing away with the idea of being a textbook at all (see below).

This book is, as you might expect from the name, based on the adventures of Cookie the cat and his two friends, a duck and a kangaroo. I say adventures, but in fact no attempt is made in the book to turn their lives into a story. Instead, they appear in various pictures through the book bouncing on trampolines, hiding stuff in their pockets and making a huge cake. You can add them to your classes more with the cat hand puppet and kangaroo poster with pocket. I didn’t have these, or the optional story cards, stickers and photocopiable masters book. On the pages of the book these characters appear in, the students have a wide variety of tasks- colour in, complete drawings with simple shapes and lines, find and circle things in the pictures, cut into flashcards, spot the differences and mistakes, sign their names etc. On the other pages where the characters don’t appear, the students do things like draw the missing halves of foodstuffs and the missing body parts of toys etc. At the back of the book there are similar pages for festivals such as Easter and Mother’s day. On the reverse side of each page there are also the lyrics of any associated songs on the CD and simple instructions for what the students have to do. The songs are all based on the tunes of well-known English language children’s songs, which is one example of how the book simplifies things nicely for the teacher and makes sure you have something is tried and tested and sure to work.

The biggest stripped down and simplified aspect of the book is that fact there are no units divisions in the students’ book, each A4 page standing alone on its own. In fact, the pages literally stand alone on their own- they are designed to be cut out of the book one by one and used with the students as worksheets, hence my comment about this course doing away with the idea of being a textbook at all. Having worksheets for the 2 to 4 year olds worked a treat- no more did they lose their place in the book, waste 5 minutes getting books out etc. This is again a simple but effective idea, and one that makes it clear that the ideas in this book are based on solutions to problems in real classroom teaching- something that is surpringingly often far from obvious in textbooks for any age. The same ‘tried and tested’ philosophy is also obvious in the ideas for games, crafts etc in the teacher’s book. You can open the teacher’s book at any point and know that it will work with almost any class with minimal preparation.

As should be the case at this age, the teacher’s book is several times as thick as the (cut-up-able) students’ book. It is set up so that all that information isn’t overwhelming, though. The teacher’s book starts with a three-page summary of the syllabus, which is surprisingly rich and varied for a book that only has 39 activities in the students’ book. A nice touch here is the division between core vocab students should learn to produce, and classroom language that students should understand and maybe produce when they are ready. The syllabus is followed by the Introduction, which is simply explained but rather long. An experienced teacher you can probably skip this and go straight to the two page spreads explaining each page of the students’ book. In fact, the songs and colouring etc. tasks are so self explanatory that I found I could work out what to do without the help of the teachers’ book at all. For less experienced teachers the teacher’s book gives step by step instructions of what you can say and do at every stage of the lesson, and just as importantly some description of why you are doing it. For any teacher, the Extra Activities in shaded boxes on each double page spread are well worth a look and again are virtually all guaranteed to work in class.

As you must have realized by now, I was very impressed with this book and if I had the power I would introduce it with all my school’s (very) very young classes from tomorrow. It doesn’t deal with reading and writing at all and so sidesteps maybe the most challenging point for young learners, but none of my 3 year olds are ready to start reading yet anyway. I will be interested to see if future levels of Cookie and Friends manage to introduce the alphabet and phonics in the same sensible and foolproof way.

Review originally published in Modern English Teacher magazine. Republished with permission.

(C) Alex Case/ Modern English Publishing