Our own copy as a child had been cancelled from a local library and was covered in yellowing sellotape. Her family said in a statement: 'Shirley's books about everyday family life are adored by generations of families and she is held in the highest esteem by her peers.

They are accompanied by a lovely story which many children will be able to relate to, with a positive message of helping others. She said at the time: 'Being chosen for the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award is a tremendous honour which I appreciate more than I can say.But Shirley Hughes also makes use of the visual chronotope, in which the reader sees several scenes, like different frames in a film reel, and is expected to understand that these are not the same-looking characters doing different things, but the very same characters depicted at different times. Comparing Bella to modern depictions of girlhood in picture books, today’s young readers are used to the convention that girls must look a certain way: They’ll probably be wearing an article of clothing that is pink. This book I would use from year one up to year, adapting the range of questions that I would asked based on the year group. All of the children at one point had a special bear and I let them into a little secret about my bear Bobby which I've owned since a child.

My favourite thing about this story is that it portrays the relationship between the siblings beautifully; I often find in children’s books that the relationship between siblings is portrayed as one of jealousy or rivalry. I would recommend this book to a post-beginner reader of around 6-7 years old due to the more advanced vocabulary and longer paragraphs. This book would be good to use at circle time also to get the children to talk about things that mean a lot to them and they would be really upset if they lost, or when they have been in a similar situation in which they have helped somebody who was really upset. Best of all has been perennially encountering very young children who are learning to look with such rapt pleasure and follow a story visually long before they are able to read. This little girl is a Spoilt Brat Trope, drawn to pretty and new things, and therefore assuaged with the promise of owning a brand new teddy bear.

With lovely illustrations and a story line that could almost happen to any child I would highly recommend all young children to read this picture book!

Bella is turning somersaults, endearingly, and reassures Dave that she didn’t like that big teddy anyway because ‘his eyes were too staring’. She studied drawing and costume design at the Liverpool School of Art and also studied fine art at Oxford's Ruskin School of Art.There are writing frames, role-play materials, display posters and vocabulary aids all tailored to your literacy lessons. Her books include the wordless picture book Up and Up, collection of rhymes and poems Out and About, and for the very young The Nursery Collection. When bedtime comes, Dogger is nowhere to be found, and although Bella loans him one of her teddies, he is very sad during the night. The author was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000 and in 2014 she was awarded the Simon Wiesenthal Centre/Museum of Tolerance Children's Book Award for Hero On A Bicycle, her first novel published in 2012. Shirley's incredible stories and illustrations, from Dogger to Alfie and Lucy and Tom, have touched so many generations and are still so loved.

Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, near Liverpool, in 1927, and studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, before continuing her studies at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. When my son went on a school trip away as a small boy I made him a miniature version of his teddy to travel with so there’d be no risk of losing his much-loved companion. If you enjoy the illustrations of Shirley Hughes, you may like to check out watercolours by John Lovett, Australian artist. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first recipient of BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award. In a brand new collection of stories and poems, Alfie has a spooky late-night adventure with an owl and introduces us to his secret den in the garden.

Hughes also said at the time of her favourite children's book growing up: 'I remember being given wonderful fairy tales, especially the editions illustrated by Arthur Rackham, whose collections had wonderful colour plates with tissue paper over them. Check out the number lines and number tracks that will help children work on place value and counting skills.