The Bear Under The Stairs

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The Bear Under the Stairs is an entertaining, suspenseful, and amusing story that toddlers will certainly enjoy and ask for again. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Eventually a stench begins to waft out of the place under the stairs and William’s “bear” is discovered. The Bear Under the Stairs is about a young boy who believes there’s a bear living in the storage closet beneath the stairs. The illustrations are done in soft watercolors and do well to represent Williams’s imaginary fears using a dark, shadowy, smudgy technique at times.

His mum thinks he is imagining things and gets cross when the cupboard starts to smell - William has been putting food in there for the bear. For any child with fears of dark places in your own home, this book might help them to see that their fears are all in their imagination. Spelling Seeds have been designed to complement Writing Roots by providing weekly, contextualised sequences of sessions for the teaching of spelling that include open-ended investigations and opportunities to practise and apply within meaningful and purposeful contexts, linked (where relevant) to other areas of the curriculum and a suggestion of how to extend the investigation into home learning. Because of the importance and detail in the pictures this book could only be used when the child/ren were able to really see in detail at the pictures – so individually or in small groups. As the story is told in rhyme and uses alliteration, it is a great way for children to review certain phonemes, particularly different ways to make the /a/ sound.Most recently she has written and illustrated The Hippo at the end of the Hall; a children’s novel published by David Fickling Books.

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. 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 book would be suitable for children slightly older in Key Stage 1 (aged 5-7 years) as they are more likely to have that understanding in place picking up that the story is about the boy’s imagination. The space under the stairs begins to smell, so William and his mother must figure our how to approach the scary bear.e. the name of the various food and fruits that William feeds the bear) is easy to teach with the use of this text. It also has strong PSHE links, particularly around overcoming fears and speaking to a trusted adult. This heighten the feeling of fear of the unknown as experienced by William, as well as giving the reader time and space to focus on the detailed illustrations. The only downside is that a few pages do have a dark color scheme that may not be as attractive to younger children.

The repetitive language ‘wham, bang, thump’ is also a fun way to encourage children to join in with the reading. It’s a chronological narrative using lots of alliteration, rhythm and rhyme – it’s really a poetry book as well as a story. She has also written and illustrated children’s MG fiction and the latest – The Taming of the Cat – published in October 2023. Therefore I would recommend this book for children aged 3+ as well as adults who are feeling rather nostalgic! Since I am by career a first grade teacher, I felt this was a great story to use with children to talk with them about their fears.Unfortunately it teaches entirely the wrong moral: that there are no monsters lurking in darkness, waiting for us. The Bear Under the Stairs is lovely book appealing directly to a child’s real-life experiences of fear, bravery and imagination. This book is a short story about a boy who believes there is a big brown grizzly bear living under the stairs in his house. This is a great book to help any young child who harbours fears of thinking there are strange things going on in the house.