KS1 Book topic: The Tear Thief

With its poetic prose and evocative illustrations, The Tear Thief by Carol Ann Duffy can inspire learning across the curriculum...

The Tear Thief is a glorious book to share with your children. Inside its pages you will find poetic language, stunning illustrations and a powerful message about emotional truth. The author, Carol Ann Duffy, was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, and she is the first woman ever to hold the post in the United Kingdom. There’s certainly a sense of poetry in the language of this book, with its rhythm, colours, textures and original imagery. The poetic language is complemented by Nicoletta Ceccoli’s ethereal pictures, with their blue, ghostly tinge.

On the surface, the story is a simple one. The tear thief is a ghostly character who moves invisibly through the night. Her job is to collect tears from the children she visits, and she does this each day, in the hour between suppertime and bedtime. Some of the tears she collects are those of anger, red and glowing like rubies, shed by a child in a furious tantrum. Others are tears of jealousy, or self-pity, or fear – all with different qualities and colours. But the most precious tears of all are those of true sadness, which are worth more than diamonds. Their very special secret is only revealed right at the end of the story.

1. Introducing the book

The character of the tear thief is very finely drawn, both in words and in pictures. This opens up some interesting options for first approaching the book. You might start by showing your children some of the images from the book, before you read them the story (the first picture of the tear thief would work well). What sort of character do they think this is? What do the colours of the pictures suggest? What kind of mood or atmosphere has been created by the illustrator? Gather lots of descriptive words together by talking about the pictures, and afterwards, see how many of the words that you found appear in the story.

Alternatively, you might start by telling the children the title of the book and asking them what they think it is going to be about. Just who or what is a ‘tear thief’? Are they stealing tears for good or for evil purposes? Is the book going to be a sad or a happy one? What kind of characters might be in the book?

2. Similes and metaphors

Whilst similes typically provide a rich supply of clichés, the joy of the imagery used in The Tear Thief is in the fresh, child-like quality of the author’s vision. Again, Duffy’s background as a poet is apparent in her choice of language. The tears of a child in mid tantrum are thrown around the room like fistfuls of gravel. Tears are oddly long, shaped like pearls or as green as emeralds.

Pick out several examples of similes and metaphors from the book, and ask your children to draw a picture of the images painted by the words. What do those oddly long tears look like? How does the tear thief move? What do those jewelled tears look like in the darkness of the sack?

With older or more able children, you could build up a bank of interesting similes, to describe the different kinds of tears a child might cry. Encourage your children to focus on colour, shape and texture, so that their images are as multisensory as possible. Give some examples to get them started: “Tears of joy are like tiny explosions of happiness on my face.” “Her tears were as sad as raindrops running down a window pane on a wet Monday morning.”

3. Explore character

Carol Ann Duffy describes the tear thief in great detail, with the first few pages of the story holding a mine of information. Re-read these pages to your class, encouraging the children to listen out for anything that tells them about her character. Ask them questions to help them learn to extract information from a text. What is she wearing? What does her hair look like? How does she move?  What is her favourite food? The children could draw or paint a picture of the tear thief and label this with quotes from the book to illustrate these points about her.

As a fun alternative to the classic character study, you might get your children to make ‘top trumps’ style cards of the tear thief and the children we meet in the story. These could include different scores for how brave the character is, how real their tears are, or how many tears they cry.

4. The sound of language

As well as using powerful imagery, Carol Ann Duffy uses the sound of language to bring her story to life. Her descriptions of how the tear thief moves hint at the character’s ghostly presence and rather sneaky actions. Get your children to hunt through the book for all the verbs that make interesting sounds, and which tell us something about her character. Your children might identify words such as: crept, sly, pounced, shimmied, peeped, pinched, filched, and so on.

Notice too the way numbers suddenly make an appearance as the child having a tantrum scatters her tears around the room. What is the effect of this on the rhythm of the text? Aim to bring all these features out in your voice as you read, and encourage the children to pick up on the sounds and rhythms of poetic language. You might also do a quick session of mental maths and get the children to count up in 5s and 10s, counting the tears along with you and the tear thief!

4. Crying wolf

There are lots of well-known sayings around the theme of tears and crying, two of which are used in the book. Many of these sayings are to do with crying that is not about ‘real sadness’, but about other emotions instead. Talk with your children about what these sayings mean: cry baby; cry wolf; crying over spilt milk; crocodile tears; for crying out loud. The children could write their own version of the story of the boy who cried wolf, updating it to a modern situation or setting. See the internet links later in this article for an explanation of where the phrase comes from, and for a simple version of the classic story.

5. Act it out

Have some fun with drama activities around the theme of different kinds of tears. Divide your children up into pairs – one person to be the tear thief and the other to be a crying child. Ask the children to decide why the child is crying; what kind of tears are these?  Now the children should create a short scene in which we see the child crying, and the tear thief coming to steal his or her tears. Alternatively, they might present a freeze frame of the scenario to the class. Can the rest of the children work out what kind of tears are being cried? What is the main emotion being shown in the scene? 

To spice things up, you could provide a sack in which the children can collect the tears, as well as some different coloured jewels or crystals: green for jealousy, white for fear, red for rage, blue for self-pity, and so on.