Today’s reading is a quiet classic about friendship. In Oliver Jeffers’s Lost and Found, a boy opens his door to find a penguin. The penguin looks sad, and the boy is sure it must be lost, so he does what any kind child would do: he tries to take it home. Along the way, he learns that helping someone means understanding what they actually need.

The book was published in 2005, won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Gold Award, and was the Blue Peter Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. It was Jeffers’s second picture book; in his first three books, readers follow an unnamed boy, a sort of everyboy, as he returns a penguin to the South Pole or tries to catch a star. Jeffers was born in Australia, grew up in Northern Ireland, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The story also became a much-loved film. Studio AKA’s Philip Hunt adapted and directed a 24-minute animated version in 2008, with music by Max Richter, and Jim Broadbent narrates it. It won the BAFTA for children’s animation at the 2009 British Academy Children’s Awards.

Watch how Jeffers uses space. The boy and the penguin are often tiny figures on big, open pages, which makes the sea feel enormous and their friendship feel precious. Notice, too, how simply he draws faces, and how much feeling still comes through.

I shaped this episode around a “Listening” arc: noticing that someone is sad, trying hard to help, and discovering that the best help begins with understanding.

Before recording, I made my index card as a tribute to the boy and his penguin. I cut the penguin from gray, wood-grain-textured paper, with a white belly and orange feet. The boy has a round yellow head from my gelli-printed paper and a mottled pink body, and he reaches one long arm toward his new friend. They stand inside a red border with black dots, in my handmade red-and-black frame.

Watch the full episode, and then read it again together. Ask your child: was the penguin really lost?