A QUIET QUIET HOUSE is a fun, rhyming, peek through story which has a repetitive refrain. It provides a wonderful reading experience which encourages children to guess why the mice are meeting at the house and it also introduces basic vocabulary for colours, vehicles, musical instruments and weather.
The Story: The cat who lives next to a quiet quiet house is having a peaceful day. But on each spread a new mouse arrives, each on a different kind of transport, at the house. The house gets noisier and noisier and we are encouraged to guess what the mice are planning. Our first guess was completely wrong!!
Mice arrive at the house in various ways including on a unicycle, skis and roller-skates. They are all carrying different coloured, mysterious looking packages as they disappear inside. A new cut out appears on each page but only part of each mouse and their package is shown so it isn’t easy to guess why the mice are there. As more and more mice arrive and the house becomes less quiet the two cats next door complain about the noise!
The mice have all brought a different instrument to play and we had fun matching each mouse on the final spread to their different shaped packages and their different modes of transport.
A QUIET QUIET HOUSE has a really easy to read rhyming text which is fun for children to join in with and is also good for beginner readers. There is a pictorial list of vocabulary at the end of the book and the story provides lots of stimulation for discussion – How many mice are there now? – Have you ever tried a pogo stick? What’s the weather like? (there are several weather changes throughout the book including snow!!).
We absolutely love Ekaterina’s illustrations which are colourful and full of details. Each double spread shows two houses and as the book progresses we see more and more mice through the windows in the house on the right. Speech bubbles show the mice greeting each other and we can also see other preparations – baking, sweeping and tidying – which aren’t mentioned in the text.
This is such a fun story for little ones and it would make a fabulous addition to an early years classroom. It’s particularly good for introducing children to different musical instruments, you could read the story and then children could listen to recordings of each instrument.
Author: Georgiana Deutsch / Ekaterina Trukhan
Thank you to Little Tiger Press for sending A QUIET QUIET HOUSE, it’s a wonderful story for little ones 🙂
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