My children love animals and would love to live on a farm! Which are the best books about farm animals or farmyards?
Farmyards are great places make excellent settings for a story. Traditionally, farmyards had a number of different animals in them. Nowadays that probably isn’t the case but that doesn’t stop authors and illustrators taking a creative view of them!
There is so much scope in a farmyard for all kinds of stories from the most realistic to the most fanciful – and with some in between. How animals behave and how they interact with each other can be used as a commentary on our own society as in George Orwell’s classic allegory Animal Farm and, for younger readers, in Martin Waddell’s picture book story Farmer Duck – wonderfully illustrated by Helen Oxenbury – which tells a similar story of farmyard politics.
One of the simplest and most delightful farmyard stories is Pat Hutchins’ Rosie’s Walk. A picture book with only a very few words it tells the story of how Rosie the hen outwits the fox as she goes about her business. While the words describe what Rosie does, the pictures tell a quite different story – one that is catastrophic for the fox. The joke is a good one; children relish the fact that by “reading” the pictures, they know what Rosie does not.
A classic title, Rosie’s Walk has been in print since it was first published in 1968. Now it is joined by a sequel: Where, Oh Where, is Rosie’s Chick? Set in the same farmyard, the story-telling trick is the same: Rosie sets off in search of her new-born chick. Where can it be? All children following the pictures will love spotting what Rosie herself can’t see as the chick, with half of its shell still stuck on its head, stumbles about the farmyard. And the original fox plays a cameo role too!
The farmyard as captured in Lydia Monks’s illustrations to Julia Donaldson’s What the Ladybird Heard is the scene of a big crime! Primarily told in Julia Donaldson’s familiar rhyming text there is much additional fun to be had from the loud clucking, mooing, baaing and hissing as all the animals in the farmyard try to deter the thieves Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len when they try to steal a prize cow. The joke is that, despite their noise and fuss, it is not the hens, cows, sheep or geese who solve the crime but the quietest creature of them all – the ladybird!
As might be expected from its title, there are a lot of noise too in Giles Andreae and David Wojtowycz’s Farmyard Hullabaloo! From the moment that daybreak is noisily announced by Rooster with his trade mark cock-a-doodle-do the hens and the pigs keep up their own noisy refrains.
A farmyard in Chile provides the setting for Margaret Read McDonald’s Farmyard Jamboree, a delightful picture book full of sounds and dancing in which a young boy introduces his family and the baby animals in the farmyard and thereabouts.
Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright’s The Complete Book of Farmyard Tales is a handsome anthology of the 20 much-loved stories set at Apple Tree Farm. Here, the farmer Mrs Boot and her children Poppy and Sam have a number of charming adventures with their dog Rusty, sheep Woolly and many others.
Drawing on his experiences as a farmer Dick King-Smith has written several novels for young readers about different animals including his very first The Fox-Busters, a hilarious story in which the hen house turn the tables on the greedy fox with some spectacular results and, most famously, The Sheep-Pig, later filmed as Babe, about a runty piglet who, having been adopted by a sheep dog, becomes a world famous sheep-pig!
A pig is also one of the stars in EB White’s classic Charlotte’s Web. The action takes place in a farmyard as all the animals and creatures in it, including the remarkable spider Charlotte, work together to save the pig Wilbur from being killed. Charlotte’s Web celebrates the intelligence of all creatures in a tender, funny and touching story that makes all children think more deeply about animals.
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