Princess Smartypants

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This book oozes personality and with so much going on it promises to maintain the attention of young readers for hours at a time Most of all, we have a lot of fun. And when we’re done with Princess Smartypants, we move on to Prince Cinders, a pretty weedy-looking royal specimen. I read this book as a child and it really inspired me to be confident and have fun. I absolutely loved it! Princess Smartypants is rebellious, independent, and very happy being single - but her parents want her to get married and settle down! This hilarious picture book has a subversive protagonist and a strong message about choosing your own destiny. Lesson 1 - Introduce the story. Discuss the title, cover, role of author/illustrator, etc. Make predictions throughout. Sequence the key events of the story as a class and then independently. Resources provided to record this in books. Challenge more able students to label their pictures with key words or sentences.

Some of her friends, however, have decided to marry their fairytale princes and Princess Smartypants has agreed to host a party for them. When the princes fail to turn up, the Princess sets off with her best friend, Eric the Anihilator, to find and rescue the missing princes.

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The focus on tropical diseases means A Dose of Doctor Dog is not as educational in its focus as the first in the series, Doctor Dog, but it also means that Babette Cole’s anarchic sense of humour can be fully unleashed.

When we reach the part where the princess - who has some incredibly extreme hobbies - sets her potential husbands a series of tasks, we come up with ideas to help the poor princes who are keen to win Smartypants’ hand in marriage. We then compile these suggestions in a handbook called “How to Help a Prince”. Lesson 2 - Introduce adjectives. Use ‘role on the wall’ to build vocabulary to describe the main character - focus on appearance. Princess Smartypants is rebellious, fiercely independent and perfectly happy to be single. Clad in dungarees and muddy wellies, she loves caring for her menagerie of unusual pets, including a selection of giant slugs, snails, spiders and dragons. Frustratingly, suitors are forever turning up to win her hand and she is under constant pressure from her parents to smarten up and settle down. Blah blah alternative princess cliche of forgoing marriage as girl empowerment; I think girls who wanna get married will be fine unless this is the only piece of media they ever consumeHeroes in stories will set out to accomplish one of the following 10 things. Here, of course, we have a story about number five:

Babette Cole has written many children’s books that seem to feature rebellious children. “Princess Smartypants” is certainly no exception. Babette Cole’s princess story has everything that both an adult and child would gladly appreciate: great sense of humor and a beautiful message about being yourself and standing up for what you believe is right.Her most famous book is probably Princess Smartypants, a reimagining of the traditional fairytale in which the helpless princess is whisked off her feet by her prince charming. But in Babette Cole’s version, the princess is a fiercely independent woman who is pressured by her parents, the king and the queen, into finding a man. Her attitude is clear from the first line of the book: Princess Smartypants is an example of a children’s picture book which uses gender reversal to tell a story that would never really happen. What if women of high socio-economic status could choose their own marriage/non-marriage partners? The ending plays into the stereotypically MRA fear — if women were allowed autonomy they may choose not to include men at all. A four lesson unit of work based around the book Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole. A read through of this book can be found on YouTube if you don’t have a physical copy. The outcome by the end of a unit is a character description. The unit can be used to introduce adjectives.