Picture Book of the Week – The Last Tiger

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You may have already spotted this book on my Instagram feed last week, but it’s such a good one I thought it was deserving of a full post on my site.

This book, The Last Tiger is written and illustrated by Petr Horacek and tells the story of a strong and proud tiger – the pride of the jungle. But, despite his strength and power, he succumbs to the hunters.

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The story is very moving and does a fantastic job at provoking children into thinking about what is important. The tiger soon learns that his strength and power are useless if he lacks his freedom.

The story ends happily as the tiger escapes and makes his way back to the jungle, and it is a thought-provoking story about the rights of animals versus our desires to see that up close in zoos and other means of captivity. This is an area close to my heart as zoos and animal-based attractions are things that we avoid.

The children don’t really ask about zoos, they know it’s not something I agree with and we’ve discussed these issues of conservation and the rights of animals many times. This book, written and illustrated so movingly really brought the concepts to life for them.

After we had read this book we created our own tigers using these templates from twinkl (I subscribe to this membership and have not been gifted it). I also printed these tiger border writing pages and had the older two children write something based on the book. Em drew a tiger and wrote that she thinks they belong in the jungle. Daniel wrote a short poem about a tiger playing with him and coming to tea.

Books like this really work for me at the moment, the gentle introduction of quite difficult and sensitive topics help initiate conversations with the children, and the appeal of the beautiful illustrations helps to keep H (at just three) engaged as he works alongside his older siblings.