She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… Some of the illustrations have speech bubbles that show pictures instead of words. Can you think of the words that the characters might be using? Oliver Jeffers graduated from The University of Ulster in 2001 with First Class honours. His outstanding talent has been recognised by several high-profile awards, including the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize Gold Award. ‘Lost and Found’ animation was broadcast on Channel 4. Oliver lives and works in Brookyln, New York. • Look at the sketches on the inside covers of the book. Can you think of some captions / speech bubbles / thought bubbles for each of them? It's the story of a little girl, "much like any other, whose head was filled with all the curiosities of the world." Her grandfather takes her to the forest, the beach, and listens to her stories and all her many questions. But then one day his armchair is empty.

The book, The Heart and the Bottle, written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers (2010), wisely begins, “Once there was a girl much like any other…”. The story is about someone and something common—someone and something understandable, relatable.But if grief is so disorienting and crushing an emotion for adults, how are unprepared little hearts expected to handle its weight? The little girl cannot, and so she doesn’t. The story is about a young girl who is curious about her world, engaged, creative, dreamy, joyful, and who has a loving bond with an older person (someone who appears to be akin to a grandparent based on the book’s illustrations). The story is also about the girl’s experience of loss when the older person is no longer there, of the emotional pain she feels, and of how she copes with that pain, of what follows. An inquisitive little girl, who is enchanted by the world around her, is badly shaken when she loses someone she loves.

The girl’s head is filled with ‘all the curiosities of the world’. What does it mean to be curious? What things are you curious about? How could you find out more about them? The little girl stands in front of an empty chair, the chair where the father daughter duo used to drift into the surreal and enthralling world of their books. She is holding a picture she has drawn illustrating one of her animal stories she had read with her father. The picture turns from day to night yet the chair is still empty and the girl is still waiting. Her sole companion in all her fantasy worlds is no longer there. As parents we always strive to shield our children from getting hurt, making sure the sharp corners of the furniture around our house are safely child proofed even before they come into this world, placing our hands strategically below their bum when they start taking their first steps, running along with them when they first learn to ride their bikes, holding them tight and close when they face their first failures or just being there when they are heart-broken. The Heart and the Bottle is one such story told through the eyes of a child; it tells us that as parents the greatest lesson we can teach our children is conceptualising loss and pain: from as trivial as losing a toy in school to losing someone dear to your life, because the inevitable cannot be fortified. Make a list of words / phrases that describe how the girl feels at the start of the story, when she finds the empty chair, and at the end of the story.

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Jeffers has also explored the subject of grief with equal subtlety and genius in a grownup project celebrating the art of bearing witness. Use the first line of the book (‘Once there was a girl, much like any other’) to start your own story. How will it be similar / different to this one? Oliver Jeffers writes very grown-up picture books, the kind that kids love and that can make adults cry. Okay, so he can make this adult cry - especially with The Heart and the Bottle.

This is a three-week Writing Root using the text The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers, with explicit spelling (through vocabulary acquisition) and grammar objectives embedded within the sequence of learning. It begins with children ‘discovering’ the setting from the text of the empty armchair and posing questions to make predictions about the book. Children explore the text further, writing character descriptions using a range of descriptive vocabulary. The story and the sequence of lessons have strong PSHE links and these need to be approached with sensitivity. Having explored the passing events of the story for The Heart and the Bottle through an emotions graph, children then create their own stories where a dilemma occurs and there is an emotional response (again, with links to PSHE). Synopsis of Text: Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-13 10:15:28 Boxid IA40257703 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

urn:lcp:heartbottle0000jeff:epub:431fb011-ca85-4b2e-9874-ef902f53d26e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier heartbottle0000jeff Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3914qp2w Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780399254529 Lccn 2009026404 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.8456 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200051 Openlibrary_edition So she sets out to liberate her heart from its glassy prison — but the bottle has been fortified by years of self-protection. Jeffers anatomises loss and the processes of grief with an honesty and ingenuity that will move adults and children of any age.” Telegraph