This story reminds me a bit of Romeo and Juliet, and the film adaptation of Gnomeo and Juliet as they all focus on a forbidden love based on family views.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published. Most children love acting and it’s a tremendous way to improve their reading. This story feels hyper relevant when you look at everything that's going on in the world at the moment. Republicans vs. Democrats, Conservatives vs. Labour, everywhere you look it's a red vs. blue world and for little ones who have no understanding of politics and no idea why everyone is so angry at each other it must be quite scary. It feels like The Smeds and the Smoos has arrived at exactly the right time, bursting onto the scene to remind children that underneath we are all the same. It doesn't matter what colour you are, and oftentimes the people warning you to stay away from others have no idea what they're really talking about.

Make up a new story about two people, animals or aliens who want to be friends but are not allowed.I feel conflicted about The Smeds and the Smoos. A Smed and a Smoo fall in love despite multiple warnings from their grandparents about why they should be avoiding each other, but unlike Romeo and Juliet this love story has a happy ending. Julia Donaldson’s uses phonetically decodable alien words, such as ‘loobular lake’ and ‘glompoms’. This means that children are able to watch the decoding of alien words, modelled by a reader, or are able to practise decoding them themselves within a fun and memorable story, giving their work at school on alien words meaning and excitement. There are lots of made-up words in this book. Can you make a glossary to explain what they all mean? Could you make up some of your own words and write definitions? Make a list of all the rhyming words in the book. Can you think of other words that rhyme with those? I think the story carries some good messages of tolerance and acceptance whilst appealing to a younger audience. It shows generational differences and views, demonstrating how the views of the younger generation are important and can help to open older generations to changing their views and beliefs.

The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools. While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. Make a list of the ways that the Smeds and the Smoos are similar / different. Is being different from others a bad thing? I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books.I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs.