The Bear Under The Stairs

Product Information

Children will particularly like the imaginative bear scenes such as what the bear does at night while William sleeps and the bear holding his luggage while parachuting down to a new house at the end. Helen Cooper is an author and illustrator whose work includes classic titles such as The Bear Under the Stairs, Pumpkin Soup, The Baby Who Wouldn’t Go to Bed and Tatty Ratty. The character of William, who is the child in the story is so afraid that there is a grizzly bear in the closet under the stairs. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

I like how it progresses from his initial feelings of fear and how he attempts to cope with it in his own way, to then sharing his fears with someone who helps to overcome it. They were really engaged and held in suspense with the storyline which kept them gripped throughout. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The themes are universal: fear, imagination, coping strategies, relationship with trusted adult, safety, bravery. The repetitive language ‘wham, bang, thump’ is also a fun way to encourage children to join in with the reading.Helen Cooper is a British children's author and illustrator whose work includes classic titles such as 'The Bear Under the Stairs', the 'Pumpkin Soup' trilogy of books, 'The Baby Who Wouldn't Go to Bed', 'Tatty-Ratty', 'Saving the Butterfly' (illustrated by Gill Smith) and 'The Taming of the Cat' which is published in October 2023. I read this book to a Reception class (aged 4-5 years old) as part of a storytime session and they loved it! Find out what happens when a nasty smell pervades the house and Mum and William decide to investigate . Unfortunately it teaches entirely the wrong moral: that there are no monsters lurking in darkness, waiting for us.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Fearing the bear will want to eat him if he gets hungry, William brings the bear food every day, tossing it in quickly with his eyes shut tight.

For a whole class it would be really nice as a “read out loud’ story but you would need a big book or visualiser to show the illustration.

Therefore I would recommend this book for children aged 3+ as well as adults who are feeling rather nostalgic! As a child I personally believed that the bear in the story was a figment of Williams’s imagination.

The rhyming is fun and the illustrations adorable, definitely a book that I'll be reading to my own children in the future. Find out what happens when a nastly smell pervades the house and Mum and William decide to investigate .The only downside is that a few pages do have a dark color scheme that may not be as attractive to younger children.