Five Children and It

The Psammead

Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane, with their baby brother, the Lamb, are spending the summer in a house in the Kent countryside. Digging in a gravel pit, they uncover a strange furry creature with eyes on long horns like a snail’s, ears like a bat’s and a body shaped like a spider’s. It is a Psammead, a sand-fairy, thousands of years old and extremely bad-tempered. It agrees to grant them one wish a day, and each wish lasts until sunset. The children wish to be beautiful, to be rich, to have wings. Every wish goes wrong. E. Nesbit’s book appeared in 1902, the first of three about these children.

Why it works for learners

Each chapter is one wish and its consequences, so the book is a set of short comic stories with a shared cast. The pattern repeats (a wish, a problem, a rush to put things right before sunset), and that repetition is good for learners. The vocabulary is everyday family life: food, money, shops, servants, the house, the garden. And because the whole book is about wishing, it’s full of the language of wishes, conditions and consequences: I wish, if only, what would happen if. Few novels give you so much practice with those structures in natural, funny contexts.

Which level to start at

A2 works well; the episodes are short and the jokes are situational. B1 keeps more of Nesbit’s narrator, who chats to the reader and teases the children. At B2 and above you’ll catch the satire about money, class and grown-ups. When a wish comes in a form you haven’t met, tap a word: the card explains the phrase it belongs to as well as the word.

Read next

• The Railway Children, Nesbit’s best-loved novel
• Peter Pan, more magic in an Edwardian nursery
• The Princess and the Goblin, a gentler fairy tale