Awards for Helen's work include The National Art Library Awards 1998 and 2001 for The Hare and the Tortoise and her version of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows in the Templar Classic series, and The National Art Library Award for The Tin Forest. Some of the illustrations made me very sad thinking about how dissmal our lives can become when we don't stop for the precious things, people, places in front of us - nature, family, friends, students who have something to share.

I bought it from my kids school book fair, neither of them (7 and 5) were very interested in it even after I purchased it and read it to them at home, I guess I prefer for them to love cheerful, colorful books with unicorns and rainbows.

Ward and Caste's story sounds too familiar as I think about our own environment and the overuse of materials and abuse of this planet. A collection of KS2 materials to support the teaching of the thought-provoking story of Varmints: Part One by Helen Ward. The framing in the book doesn't really happen as most of the picture covers the book with the dark text on a dark background. minutes long, it can be broken up into sections for viewing in the classroom (and is unfortunately interrupted anyway by pesky youtube advertising).

In the case of this book, I couldn't help but think of the definition of "varmint", which is noted just inside the book cover: "an irritating or obnoxious person or animal".While the text is self-consciously elliptical, one thing is clear: the blame lies with ‘Others’ who ‘came one day’ from outside, the ‘varmints’ (a variant, we are told, of the word vermin), with THEM. Children in KS2 will, I think, love the animation and the central character, and be engaged by the conversations around its content. As the book progresses, and more industrialisation and skyscrapers are built, the imagery gets darker and darker. Adapted and directed by Marc Craste, Varmints is a 24-minute film based on the award-winning book of the same name – written by Helen Ward and illustrated by Marc Craste – that tells the story of a lonely varmint, living in an idyllic world that is suddenly destroyed by the arrival of a grey, high rise city.

However, for the bunnies this is only the start, they are now on the left side of the page going on a journey.This is a three-week Writing Root using the film (which can be found online) and text of Varmints by Helen Ward and Marc Craste. In 1985, her final year at Brighton, Helen was awarded the first Walker Prize for Children's Illustration. Here Ward's brief lament for the loss of nature's peace and quiet to rampant urbanization really gets tricked out by elaborate packaging, occasional translucent pages and Craste's hyper-atmospheric digital art.

These warmed the hearts of those who cared to listen - until the others came to fill the sky with a cacophony of noise. The story is as old as industrialisation but I'm sure it has never been told so succinctly and beautifully as here. I haven't even had a chacne to read this yet but the art for this is so beguilingly gorgeous that i can't help but give it 5 stars already. The sequence of learning starts with children entering the classroom to find seeds and flowers mysteriously left with an urgent letter of appeal from the main protagonist in the text, urging children to look after them and learn all they can about these gifts.But someone is nurturing a little piece of wilderness, and at the right time takes it to the right place.