Five Children and It (1902)
by E. Nesbit (1858-1924)
Teacher’s notes
A summary of the book:
One day five children find a Psammead in a gravel pit when they are playing in the sand. It is a very old, ugly and irritable sand fairy. It grants them one wish each day, lasting until sunset. The children soon learn that it is very hard to think of really sensible wishes, and every wish gets them into unexpected difficulties. Magic can be as awkward as it is enticing and exciting!
Adapted from www.imdb.com
About the Author:
Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is best known as the author of The Railway Children. She wrote some thirteen other children's stories, the most familiar including The Treasure Seekers, Five children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet. Born in 1858, Edith Nesbit was the daughter of the head of a British agricultural college. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, a journalist. They had a good deal in common: Both were socialists, active in the Fabian Society. Yet the marriage was unhappy. Bland was a philanderer; worse, he had no gift for making a living. As a result, simply to support her five children, Nesbit began to write books about children. It was Nesbit who, almost a century before JK Rowling invented Harry Potter, had put the fantasy and magic into children's literature with novels such as Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet. Amongst her friends were H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward.
Adapted from The Nesbit Society
In a recent biography, Magic and the Magician, Noel Streatfield remarks that E. Nesbit did not particularly like children, which may explain why the ones that she created in her books are so entirely human. They are intelligent, vain, aggressive, humorous, witty, cruel, compassionate…in fact, they are like adults, except for one difference. In a well-ordered and stable society (Edwardian England), children are as clearly defined a minority group as Jews or Negroes in other times and places. Physically small and weak, economically dependent upon others, they cannot control their environment. As a result, they are forced to develop a sense of communality which though it does not necessarily make them any nicer to one another at least makes it possible for them to see each other with perfect clarity, and it is part of Nesbit's genius that she sees them as clearly and unsentimentally as they see themselves, making for that sense of life without which there is no literature at any level.
Nesbit's usual device is to take a family of children ranging in age from a baby to a child of ten or eleven and then involve them in adventures, either magical or realistic
The children encounter a Psammead, a small bad-tempered, odd-looking creature from pre-history. The Psammead is able to grant wishes by first filling itself with air and then exhaling. ("If only you knew how I hate to blow myself out with other people's wishes, and how frightened I am always that I shall strain a muscle or something. And then to wake up every morning and know that you've got to do it…"). But the children use the Psammead relentlessly for their wishes, and something almost always goes wrong. They wish "to be more beautiful than the day," and find that people detest them, thinking they look like Gypsies or worse. Without moralizing, Nesbit demonstrates, literally, the folly of human wishes, and amuses at the same time.
www.nybooks.com
Themes
Nesbit is one of the founders and leading figures in creating “Fantasy literature of England”
Nesbit combines children's fantasy with other children's genres
Interactive groups of children as central characters
Use of plot devices such as travel to the past, quest structures and time travel
Belief and doubt
Reality and fantasy
Gender issues
The book is about action: planning, preparing, gathering information, debating, puzzles and motives rather than relationships, characters, feelings or descriptions of society
http://muse.jhu.edu
Things to discuss and think about before you see the film
1. What is magic? Why do we seem to need magic in our lives?
2. If you could have your own wish, what would it be? Why?
3. How many wishes do characters in stories usually get? Find out if the author follows this rule.
4. Find out what role adults play in the story.
Important Vocabulary:
A fairy
A wish
A gravel pit
Sunset
To grant a wish
To turn to stone
Naughty
Ugly
Activities to do before you watch the film
1. Read the text in the appendix.
2. Before watching the sub-titled film on DVD, make your own film script of the children meeting the Psammead.
a) Read the text from the book (see appendix)
b) Make a list of all the locations (places) that are described in the text. Where would filming need to take place?
c) What special effects would be needed?
d) Write your script
(See the example of a film script in the teaching resource “Narnia”)
Now watch the film. How does your script compare to the film version?
Which version adheres closest to the story in the book? What changes have been made and why?
Activities to do after you have watched the film
1. Do the quiz in appendix 1.
2. Discuss:
a. If you could have one of the children’s wishes from the story, which would it be? Why? How would you avoid making the same mistakes as the children?
b. Do the characters spend time discussing their feelings and relationships or are they mostly making plans and doing things?
c. What do you think of the children’s clothes? Would you like to wear them?
d. How were children treated in Edwardian times? What do you think about it? How have things changed? Are children treated better now or worse?
Writing activities
1. Write a list of the children’s wishes.
Make a flow diagram for each wish showing the consequences of each wish.
2. Divide your page into five columns. Write the adjectives that describe the characteristics of each of the five children in the story.
Robert / Anthea / Jane / Cyril / The Baby3. Make a comic strip about a wish that goes wrong.
4. You are one of the five children. You are going out to meet the sand fairy and you know you will be late home. Write a note to mother to say you will be late home. Can you tell her about the sand fairy? How will you explain that you will be late?
5. Read this excerpt from Chapter 1:
(In towns) of course there are the shops and the theatres, but if your people are rather poor you don't get taken to the theatres, and you can't buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves--such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape--all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country. Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets, where the blades of grass don't grow, everything is like everything else. This is why so many children who live in towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, tutors, governesses, and nurses; but I know. And so do you, now. Children in the country are naughty sometimes, too, but that is for quite different reasons.
6. Do you agree with the author, that children in towns are naughtier than children in the country? Give reasons for your answer.
Where would you rather live, in a town or in the country? Give reasons for your answer.
7. E. Nesbit writes: “You can always make girls believe things much easier than you can boys.” Do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer.
8. What magical creatures exist in Norwegian Folklore? Write about them and send your text to a friend in England.
9. Write a story set in a realistic everyday situation, where something strange happens that may be magic.
Things to find out using the internet
1. Find out about “Edwardian England”.
2. Here are the names of some famous fairies. Find out who they are by using the Internet.
Tinkerbell
Oberon
Tooth fairy
Sugar Plum Fairy
Puck
Titania
Cottingley fairies
Ariel
Fairy Godmother
3. Find information about the Cottingley fairies. Write an article about them for your school newspaper or give a presentation to the class.
4. Usually you would not expect a fairy to look like the Psammead. What would you expect a fairy to look like? Look at the fairies drawn by Cicely Mary Barker (www.flowerfairies.com/uk/).
Make a list of the adjectives that you would use to describe a fairy and then write a description. Use the description in a poem or a story.
Further Activities:
1. Make a Magic Show and entertain your friends.
2. Look at the video clips of Five children and It on www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/fivechildren/videoclips/index.shtml
Compare the visual appearance of the characters in the BBC film (1991) and on the DVD film (2005). Which do you prefer and why?
Appendix 1
A quiz
1. Which of these words describes the age of the Psammead?
a) Ancient and old
b) New
c) Young
2. Who saw the Psammead first?
a) Jane
b) Cyril
c) Anthea
3. Whose nickname is the Lamb?
a) Robert
b) The baby
c) Jane
4. How long does each wish last?
a) One year
b) One week
c) One day
5. What does the sand fairy have do to grant a wish?
a) Say a spell
b) Take a big breathe and close his eyes
c) Dance in the sand
6. Which of these wishes did the children NOT ask for?
a) To have wings and fly
b) To be rich
c) To be famous
7. Which of the following are not names used for “It” in the book?
a) Ariel
b) Psammead
c) Sand fairy
d) Sammyadd
8. Which statement is true?
a) The children get their wish granted where ever they are
b) The children have to visit the sand fairy to get their wish granted
c) The children have to pay the sand fairy to get a wish
9. Why did the children promise never to ask Psammead for another wish?
a) They were bored of wishes
b) They could not find the sand fairy
c) They had to solve a problem, and the only way was to have no more wishes
10. Where does the Psammead live?
a) In a cave
b) Under the sand
c) In a tree
Appendix 2
Five Children and It
Important Vocabulary:
A gravel pit = et grusuttak
Big/bigger = stor, større
Wide = bred
Dry = tørr
A hole = et hull
to dig/digging/dug = å grave
hot = varmt
wet = våt
fur = pels
fat = tykk
to move = å bevege seg
to hurt = å skade
a wish = et ønske
Chapter 1 (adapted excerpt)
a gravelpit a sand-martin a giant
…The gravel-pit is very big and wide, with grass growing round the edges at the top, and dry stringy wild-flowers, purple and yellow. It is like a giant's wash-hand basin. And there are mounds of gravel, and holes in the sides of the basin where gravel has been taken out, and high up in the steep sides there are the little holes that are the little front doors of the little sand-martins' little houses…
a sand castle, a bucket and a spade
The children built a castle, of course, but castle-building is no fun when you have no hope of the swishing sea water ever coming in to wash away the castle, and to wet everybody up to the waist at least. They ended up all going to work to dig a hole through the castle to Australia. The children, you see, believed that the world was round, and that on the other side the little Australian boys and girls were really walking wrong way up, like flies on the ceiling, with their heads hanging down into the air.
The children dug and they dug and they dug, and their hands got sandy and hot and red, and their faces got damp and shiny. The baby had tried to eat the sand, and had cried so hard when he found that it was not brown sugar, that he was now tired out, and was lying asleep in the middle of the half-finished castle. This left his brothers and sisters free to work, and the hole that was to come out in Australia soon grew so deep that Jane asked the others to stop.
"Suppose the bottom of the hole gave way suddenly," she said, "and you fell out among the little Australians, all the sand would get in their eyes."
shells a cave an anchor
"Yes," said Robert. “Let's go and look for shells; I think that little cave looks likely, and I see something sticking out there like a bit of wrecked ship's anchor, and it's very hot in the Australian hole."
The others agreed, but Anthea went on digging. She always liked to finish a thing when she had once begun it. She felt it would be wrong to leave that hole without getting through to Australia.
Anthea suddenly screamed:
"Cyril! Come here! Oh, come quick! It's alive! It'll get away! Quick!"
They all ran back to the hole.
a rat a snake
"It's a rat, I shouldn't wonder," said Robert. "Father says they infest old places--and this must be old if the sea was here thousands of years ago."--