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Nicola Kent Books

The first in a charming new series by author Nicola Kent. Packed with beautiful full colour illustrations and a delightful story about best friends, Cat and Dumpling.

Cat and Dumpling are best friends, but they’re very different. Cat is an impulsive dreamer who loves to knit, and Dumpling is a cautious planner who loves gardening. In these chapter books for early readers, the pair’s far-fetched schemes and conflicting ideas wreak warm-hearted slapstick havoc, but always with a happy ending and a reassertion that despite their differences Cat and Dumpling will always be the very best of friends.

In Home Sweet Home, Cat and Dumpling meet for the very first time. They’re both searching for the perfect home and have very different needs. Eventually they stumble across the perfect place-the only problem is, they both want the same flat! Can the pair survive as flatmates, or will their differences just be too much to overcome?

Look out for the next book in the series: Cat and Dumpling: The Talent Show.

The book is perfect for an Early Years classroom library or would support an All About Me topic, linking with Knowledge and Understanding of the world (Science) and Maths.

The story introduces children to concepts for different types of non-standard measurement, facts about the five senses and interesting information about the human body related to measurement, for example, the smallest and largest bones in the body. The height chart at the back was a bonus and is also full of facts, which, when put on the wall, facilitated a lot of comparative language conversations in the classroom between children about their height.

The diverse illustrations include a child with a walking frame, a girl with a head scarf and a child with a tracheostomy collar. The number of opportunities to be curious is maximised in this book- a book that we will come back to again and again for sure!

Everyone knows that little sisters can be an-noy-ing! So when Ravi gets annoyed with Ruby and breaks her toy car in a rage, everyone goes to bed upset. Ravi wakes up the next morning with a bright red grumpy hat stuck fast on his head! And he can’t get rid of it, no matter how hard he tries… Ravi learns how to swap his grumpy hat for happy socks in this uplifting story about siblings, family life and controlling bad moods.

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