Elmer the patchwork elephant has a problem to solve for kangaroo, who’s having trouble with his jumping. The more he tries the worse he performs and there’s an important jumping competition coming up he’d like to win. Elmer and his friends give kangaroo confidence, teach him to relax a little and have fun on the way to success.
Elmer is already a well known character to many young readers with his friends Lion and Tiger. Here they gain a new friend Kangaroo. Tiger and Lion introduce the stranger Kangaroo and his problem to Elmer and together they help him to success.
As with all the Elmer stories the underlying theme is friendship but additionally we have the chance to reflect upon how important confidence is to learning and how friends can make or break your self esteem. These are important lessons for young learners and McKee with his deceptively simple prose teaches us both through the situations the characters find themselves in and also quite explicitly: ‘Strangers often act strangely; that’s why they’re strangers’.
The illustrations are full of exotic colours and shapes which make up Elmer’s fantasic jungle and in the classroom it is possible to use Mckee as a stimulus for the children’s own art work as they recreate the exotic landscapes in paint, collage and other media. The facial expressions of the animals are easy for young children to read and contain a wealth of cialis reactions meaning. There is an old colonial touch to the dialogue, where the characters refer to each other as ‘chaps’ and Lion has the bearing and moustache of the military characters in Evelyn Waugh. In this way McKee’s work is redolent of a world long gone but the issues he tackles in his work are timeless.
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