Branching Out: Books for Fans of Pamela Butchart

This is a delightful book celebrating family and friendships and is part of a very popular series. Anisha is a funny and resourceful character, whose love of STEM and eye for detail makes her the perfect detective in this humorous series of mysteries.  Anisha has an extended family that proves to be strong and supportive when things go wrong. There are authentic cultural references exploring Anisha’s Indian heritage, particularly around food and family.

The illustrations by Emma McCann help to reflect the humour in the story and the text is often broken up with lists and diagrams, making the book particularly appealing to children who may be daunted when faced with full pages of text. 

Izzy loves science. She loves experiments and wants to be an inventor. When she is summoned to help get some fairy tales back on track, she is sceptical – she doesn’t believe in fairies and magic. But can she use her science knowledge, along with a little imagination, to help everybody out?

This early, illustrated chapter book by Zanna Davidson is great for budding scientists or anyone with a curious mind. Mixing well-known fairy tales with science and experiments shows that you don’t have to believe in just one or the other. Izzy is a strong character who knows her own mind but who also realises that sometimes you have to adjust your beliefs. The book is set out in a way that makes it very accessible for emerging readers. There are no long pages full of text: the story is set out in a way that incorporates the illustrations by Elissa Elwick as part of the story, rather than an addition. Speech bubbles, maps, explanations and experiments are interspersed throughout the book as integral elements of telling the story.

This makes it very user-friendly and an ideal book to those starting out with longer texts. That’s not to say it’s and easy book- the vocabulary is challenging in places and scientific vocabulary is used appropriately throughout.This would be a great addition to any class book shelf or school library.

You’re bound to know a Pamela Butchart fan – someone who adores school-based hijinks of the silliest kind – and Ben Davies’ series kicks off in the same high-energy, slapstick style. Lenny Lemmon is the wildcard of the class, with a huge imagination and a healthy disrespect for rules. He does try to do the right thing, but more often than not it’s going to land him in trouble – and in this story, it’s going to land him in a rather big patch of gruel. Lenny’s class is doing “Victorian School Day”, and what would be more original and impressive to bring in than a giant, scruffy wild rat?

Obviously Ratty is not going to be a nice, placid, stay-in-the-cage kind of rat, is he? With best friend Sam and the mysterious new girl Jessica Conrad (who claims to be a professional rat-catcher from America), Lenny and Ratty cause absolute, sticky, disgusting pandemonium across the entire school. Including the exceptionally very secret hidden bit…

This is a great book for Y3 upwards; packed with crazy illustrations, gags and facepalm moments. It would be a nice addition to any library and would work well as a read-aloud for a book club or to read to a class, especially at the beginning of term.

This is a highly recommendable early chapter book series, featuring an inclusive and humorous story a with illustrations throughout.

Scooter lives in a jam factory with his parents and has Cerebral Palsy. His head fizzes with brilliant ideas and he’s the one behind all of the fantastic jams produced in the factory. Scooter is also longing for a friend – and his wishes come true when a friendly alien called Fizzbee crash-lands through the jam factory window! The pair pull together to thwart a devious villain who wants to steal Scooter’s jam-making secrets.

This is an original story full of warmth and humour and a lovely choice to read aloud to Year 2 children.

Millions is the humorous tale of a not-so-great train robbery. Damian and Anthony are brothers who unwittingly find themselves in possession of a large amount of money after being caught up in a train robbery. The pair have big decisions to make, needing to reconcile their wildly different ideas about what to do with the cash. You may also like Framed by the same author.

The Treehouse books form an enormously popular children’s book series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton.

The series features a fun-loving pair of friends who live in an imaginative treehouse with lots of fun extra rooms. As the series progresses, the treehouse expands and before long contains everything from a movie theatre, dinosaur petting zoo, marshmallow-toasting volcano and a ninja snail academy.

Highly illustrated with comic-style line drawings, treehouse diagrams and speech bubbles, these books are wildly popular with children aged 7 plus. The high image-to-text ratio coupled with its wacky sense of humour have helped the series to earn its reputation for hooking children into reading.

We love this laugh-out-loud series with a tongue-in-cheek humour and plenty of funny asides, but also a poignant side about bullying, overcoming adversity and dealing with big emotions.

Charlie magically changes into animals when he is worried or stressed (not necessarily chickens, though). Charlie’s worries pile up, with a brother in hospital, parents bickering and a school bully to deal with. Riproaring and hilarious antics follow suit as Charlie navigates temporarily changing into a spider, a rhino, a pigeon, snake and more.

Children with a wacky sense of humour will find this story really funny, and it provides plenty of opportunity to think and discuss the deeper topics too.