Playing by the book’s new site is now live! Please come over to http://www.playingbythebook.net/ (where I’ve left the details for the giveaway), and don’t forget to update your bookmarks 
This is my last post on this old site. In the next day or so I shall get the automatic redirect set up. Looking forward to seeing you all at http://www.playingbythebook.net/!
It’s an exciting time at Playing by the book – the next post will feature a new giveaway… and to enter you will have to visit the new Playing by the book site The new site is not yet live, but should be in the next couple of days, and once it’s all up and running I’ll let you know the details of the giveaway.
When all systems are go I shall post the new URL (web address) here, and also set up an automatic redirect so that you can get to the new site easily. You may need to change your bookmarks, and if you subscribe to this blog it may be necessary to resubscribe with the new address (hoping, as I am, you’ll want to continue reading about our books and play!).
In anticipation of the move we’re already playing Come On Over To My Place by the Drifters and we may yet play See you on the other side by Ozzy Osbourne.
Looking forward to seeing you at the new site!
We had a wet summer this year, but since September we’ve had almost no rain and when M has come home after school we’ve been able to play outside, much to everyone’s delight. With our sunflowers well and truly past it the time came to uproot the giant stalks, but instead of immediately chopping them up for the compost bin we used the giant stems to make a tipi, our home for the afternoon.
We leant the sunflower stems against each other and then tied them together with string. We covered the basic frame with various large pieces of material from my stash including a couple of saris (I’m a huge fan of saris for building dens – they are easy for the kids to use as they’re light, drape well and are easy to clip on to things, plus being slightly see-through they let in light, and of course they are often beautiful! Apologies to those of you who think this sounds like I’m repeating myself 
). We used butterfly clips to fix the material to the frame – butterfly clips are relatively easy for M to use by herself and and J for some reason finds them intrinsically desirable. I like them because they are *strong* – much better than normal washing pegs/clips – I definitely recommend having a bunch of them stashed for making dens.
I put a tarp down on the grass inside the tipi and then we made our afternoon abode a whole lot comfier with various quilts, blankets and beanbags. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, you can see why the girls insisted on having their supper in the tent!
Unfortunately our beautiful home-from-home was a fleeting beauty as we are already getting heavy dews overnight with the cold air and so everything had to be dismantled before bedtime, but it was definitely worth the effort!
Whilst a supply of outsized sunflower stems may not be locally available to you, you could do this with bamboo stems (the tall ones you can get from garden centres), or anything else you can find about 2m tall (?pieces of downpipe, real tent poles, narrow planks of wood…). A few bed sheets would suffice to cover the frame and if you don’t want to use your regular sheets, you could get some second-hand ones very cheaply from charity shops (then keep them safe as part of your den building stash!).
Of course some reading also got done in our cozy tipi, including a new book for us – A House Is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Betty Fraser. This book was first published 31 years ago and yet I only came across this book thanks to a comment left here on the blog (Thanks again Chrissy!) – and boy am I grateful for that comment because this book is absolutely wonderful, one that I think every family and school should have, and one which I’ve now recommended to our public library too as they didn’t have a copy. I don’t know how it is that I had never come across this book before – I can only suppose that it is because it is an American book, and because we’ve got a fairly vibrant kids’ lit scene here in the UK, books from elsewhere often don’t get the publicity they warrant.
But back to this gorgeous book which is wonderful to read, great to listen to, and utterly delightful to look at. (Yes, I know I’m gushing, but it really is that good!). Mary Ann Hoberman has written a bouncing poem with strong, effective rhymes about all the different types of homes and houses one can find. She starts with the names for different animal homes, for example in the opening lines:
A hill is a house for an ant, an ant.
A hive is a house for a bee.
A hole is a house for a mole or a mouse
And a house is a house for me!
As the book progresses Hoberman widens her interpretation of “home” to include all sorts of containers and their contents, for example:
Barrels are houses for pickles
And bottles are houses for jam.
A pot is a spot for potatoes.
A sandwich is home for some ham.
This imaginative redefining of “home” brings a great deal of (slightly zany) humour to the poem, which eventually ends a reminder that “Each creature that’s known has a house of its own / and the earth is a house for us all.”
This poem is a great vocabulary builder, with its inclusion of a wide variety of animal homes (eg. coop, sty, fold, hutch), but over and above this educational aspect, Hoberman’s text is simply great fun. Her creative take on “home” is really stimulating – it keys into a childlike/fairytale belief that apparently inanimate objects can have lives of their own, and before long M and I were laughing as we thought of other “homes” (”My mouth’s a home for some chocolate! or “My bed’s a home for my ted” “Your armpit’s a home for a tickle!”). The rhymes always work well and make the book a pleasure to read aloud, as well as appealing to young ears (I think the sing-song rhythm is why J, at just 1, enjoyed listening to this book with us).
So the text is definitely a winner… but then there are the illustrations… and they are so very lovely, detailed and beautifully coloured, creating a world that I simply want to step into and be part of. Each time the line “A house is a house for me” is repeated, Betty Fraser has drawn a different childhood den – the stuff of dreams – from tree houses and seaweed shelters at the beach, to under-the-table retreats, or a blanket thrown over the washing line. M has spent quite some time pouring over the images, enjoying finding tiny details (like the inclusion of a small owl and pussycat in a pea-green boat sailing on the ocean which is home to a whale) in the illustrations which fill each page to bursting. Betty Fraser’s style reminded me of some of the Little Golden Books – her use of colour in particular gives her images a vintage feel.
One final point I think is worth making is that with A House Is a House for Me you get quite a lot of book for your money – over 40 pages – which seems to be a lot for a £5 picture book these days.
Whilst outside we didn’t listen to any music, but we have recently had on some goodies: Elvis Presley’s version of There’s no place like home, Home on the Range sung by Roy Rogers and Build My House by Woody Guthrie.
For some more den inspiration take a look at this great round up of outdoor dens from The Crafty Crow – check out the link to Ikat Bag in particular as she has a really inspiration list of links for table tents – I have drooled so much over these I think I shall now have to make one for a christmas or birthday present for me the girls…
What good memories have you got of making dens as a kid yourself, or with your own kids?
How many library books do you think you’ve read with your kids in the last year? I’ve always imagined that we’re big users of our local library, but then I came across Reading My Library – Carrie is aiming to read every single one of the children’s picture books in her local library in the next 12-24 months! Now that to me sounds like a great challenge and an exciting adventure, and as I’m always on the look-out for new ways to find great kids’ books I thought I’d (admittedly rather loosely) incorporate her approach into our own library visits.
So working through the shelves J pulled down Penguin by Polly Dunbar, who we’d come across previously when we read (and enjoyed) Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy. Penguin won the Booktrust Early Years Awards in pre-school category and the silver award in the Nestle Children’s Book Prize for children under five years old in the year it was first published (2007) so all the signs pointed towards us taking this book home and having fun reading it. And that is exactly what we did.
Ben ripped open his present.
Inside was a penguin.
“Hello, Penguin!” said Ben.“What shall we play?” said Ben.
Penguin said nothing.
Ben tries everything to get his lovely new stuffed toy friend to talk to him – he tickles his penguin, he sings a silly song, he stands on his head. But all to no avail. Ben becomes a little frustrated and pokes fun at Penguin but this also fails to provoke a response. More drastic action is required.
When even firing penguin into outer space doesn’t work, Ben gives up and tries to feed his present to a passing lion. However, the lion doesn’t play ball; he refuses to eat the penguin. Poor Ben is exasperated and finally yells furiously at the penguin and then… something truly terrible happens!
Quite what occurs is best left to enjoy when you read this book, but suffice it to say that this calamitous event finally spurs the penguin into action, catastrophe is averted, and in his own way, Penguin finally does what Ben has wanted all along and all’s well that ends well.
This story, with its twist initially reminiscent of something out of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales, is simply and beautifully told by Polly Dunbar. What I love is that it perfectly captures that childhood belief that your soft toys are “real”, balancing rational fact (as adults we know that these are, after all, inanimate objects) with youthful hope and optimism, the latter being richly rewarded. The illustrations are uncluttered and simple (like the text); the interaction between the characters becomes the focus with virtually no background or visual setting to give away their location. The large expanses of white page surrounding the characters instead ensure the sparse use of colour is particularly effective. So all in all, in this household we all agree that Penguin is most definitely a worthy award winner, and a must-read for families with young children.
Inspired by the eponymous penguin, we set to making our own penguin colony. Here’s how we did it:
1. We gathered:
2. We mixed up some black paint with PVA glue and then used the potato to make black blobs all over the sheet of card.
3. Before the black glue/paint mix dried we stuck the white roundish paper on to the black potato prints to create the penguins’ tummies.
4. Again, before the glue had time to dry we added eyes to each of the penguins….
5. …. and then beaks
6. To complete the penguins we draw some feet and flippers (M insisted on being anatomically incorrect – “MY penguins have *long* legs”).
We used pencils rather than pens because when the pencil tips got a bit of paint/glue on them it was easier to wipe off than if we had used felt tips.
7. The penguin landscape was covered in snowy cotton wool, stuck down with some more PVA glue.
Admittedly I prepared the tummies and beaks in advance, but even so, this was still a quick and easy craft with instant results. Originally I had wanted to use potatoes to print all parts of the penguins, but I realised that the girls would get very bored waiting for the paint to dry before printing the next part of the penguin (which would have been necessary for the paint not to mix and turn everything black). I think individual penguins could work well as christmas cards, especially if you added a couple of silver stars or a bit of glitter. Alternatively you could use brown paint and red tummies and make robins.
Penguin: 
(We bought our own copy this week for £1.99 from The Works)
Whilst making the penguins we’ve been listening to Happy Feet’s soundtrack and the totally raucous but and fun Antarctica by The Dreadnoughts. Other penguin inspired activities we’ve noted for future crafty sessions include:
Finally, we’d love to hear what books, songs and crafts about penguins you and your kids love…so over to you now!
We have a few birthday traditions in this house (chocolate cake, of course, bunting and Dutch slingers – paper bunting / garlands often with words, shapes or characters – see here for some pictures), and last weekend we added what I hope will become a new tradition – a crown of flowers for the birthday person. The girls always love it when we do something with fresh flowers (remember the house of flowers?) and seeing as the garden is currently overflowing with nasturtiums, we turned some of them into crowns.
This is how we did it.
1. We gathered together:
2. We placed the long strip of paper at the edge of the table (in order that the flowers could lie flat, with their heads hanging over the edge), taped down each end and then lay flowers across the strip of paper.
3. The flowers were sellotaped into place.
4. The stems were cut off, so that none overhung the paper strip.
5. The two ends of the paper strip were brought together in a circle and sellotaped together. Voila – a finished crown These worked really well as crowns – the nasturtiums lasted maybe 3 hours before they started looking manky – but I think they would also work well as table decorations eg around candles or vases.
So having had such fun with the nasturtiums, I set about finding a book that had them in. First point of call was our collection of Flower Fairies books, where sure enough there is a Nasturtium flower fairy:
…………………………….
Nasturtium the jolly,
O ho, O ho!
He holds up his brolly
Just so, just so!
(A shelter from showers,
A shade from the sun;)
‘Mid flame-coloured flowers
He grins at the fun.
Up fences he scrambles,
Sing hey, sing hey!
All summer he rambles
So gay, so gay-
Till the night-frost strikes chilly,
And Autumn leaves fall,
And he’s gone, willy-nilly,
Umbrella and all.
……………………….
Not the greatest of poems I’m sure you’ll agree; it certainly didn’t fill M and J with excitement. So off I set to find some other nasturtium related literary delight. Ted Hughes has a poem called Moon-Nasturtium in his collection The earth-owl and other moon-people, with the opening lines:
Nasturtiums on earth are small and seething with horrible
green caterpillars.
On the moon they are giant, jungles of them, and swarming
with noisy gorillas.
(click here for the full text). This was certainly more interesting for M, although we actually love the caterpillars that feed off nasturtiums – they are one of the reasons we grow them!
The earth-owl and other moon-people, which Ted Hughes wrote specifically for children, is an interesting collection of poems, although most of them are better suited for older primary school children, or young secondary school kids (other poems in the collection which I think could be enjoyed by younger school-age listeners include Music on the Moon, Tree Disease and Moon Tulips). The poems describe a fantasy world on the moon where strange and nonsensical creatures are the norm, and as such I think they are great for sparking kids’ imagination. The original illustrations by R.A. Brandt seem to me very much of their time (the collection was first published in 1963) – black, white and mostly only suggestive of their inspiration, and I think the poems could find a new lease of life if republished with newly commissioned illustrations that capture the Lear-esque, larger-than-life essence of Hughes’ poetry in this collection.
If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand was where I turned next as it contains the most gorgeous illustration of some nasturtiums:
If Not for the Cat was definitely my most successful find as far as M and J were concerned. Prelutsky has written 17 short poems (technically each a haiku) about animals, without actually naming any given animal and so each poem works as a little riddle that M enjoyed solving. In addition to the enjoyment derived from solving the poetic puzzles, both girls loved the beautiful, painted illustrations, combining bold watercolour washes with perfectly placed detail.
A Flower Fairy Alphabet: Hmm, how to rate this? I suppose every young girl will enjoy the flower fairies at some point, but more for the illustrations than the poems, so I guess I’ll go for 
The earth-owl and other moon-people: Another slightly tricky one to rate, though for different reasons. Great for adults and older kids, but not for preschoolers or younger, so again
If Not for the Cat: No difficulty here – fun poems, great interaction with guessing the animal, superb illustrations so
Whilst making our crowns we listened to Will there be any stars in my crown? by The Cox Family on the Down From the Mountain album and Wait Till I Put On My Crown by the The Delta Rhythm Boys. Before the nasturtiums are over for this season we will have to have a go at this Nasturtium Fairy Nectar, and I’d also like to use the crayon melt technique described here by Almost Unschoolers to make some of our own pictures of nasturtiums – I think the fiery autumn colours would be perfect for these flame-like flowers.
Now over to you – do you know of any beautiful nasturtium illustrations / stories / poems in kids books? And what about your favourite birthday traditions?
