Book Review: The Lion First Bible

The Lion First Bible
by Pat Alexander

I have been looking around for a few months for a book of Bible stories for Cherub. With the older two girls I used The Lion First Bible, but our copy had gone adrift somewhere. Angel loved this book, but I don't remember reading it much with Star, and I thought it would be nice to try something different this time round. I browsed the children's Bible section at Borders, which had several, but none of them shouted "buy me". Either the text didn't flow well, or the story selection was too limited, or something else wasn't right. I wondered about The Beginner's Bible (we have a copy from Angel's Sonlight Curriculum days), which I remembered as vaguely similar to The Lion First Bible - they both have a wide selection of stories, and are in the same small, chunky format - but the simplistic, easy reader text didn't appeal. In the end I bit the bullet and bought another copy of The Lion First Bible.

Now I have it, I remember why I liked it. The pictures are not really my style - too cartoony - but the text is just right for a three or four year old. Interestingly, it doesn't look good. The short sentences look bitty, but read aloud they work. The stories lend themselves to quite dramatic reading, and have enough familiar points of reference to appeal to small children. Here is a sample from the story of Noah, which is Cherub's top pick so far ...

Bang! Bang! Bang! went the hammer.
Noah was building a boat - an enormous boat. Big enough for all his family. Big enough to save two of every kind of animal and bird when the great flood came.

God was very sad about his world. It was all spoiled now. The people were so nasty and unkind. All except Noah. Noah was nice. Noah was good. Noah was friends with God.

"I have to get rid of all this nastiness," God said to Noah one day. "The beautiful world I made is all spoiled.There's going to be a great flood. Enough water to take away everything that is bad. But you will be safe."
Then God told Noah to build a boat - The Ark.

Noah did as God said. He always did as God said.
Bang! Bang! Bang! went the hammer.
At last The Ark was finishd.

The animals were so excited.
"Quack! Quack!" said the ducks.
"Moo! Moo!" said the cows.
"Hurry! Hurry!" said the geese.
"Cheep! Cheep!" chirped the sparrows. "Don't leave us behind."

"All aboard!" said Noah. And God shut the door of The Ark behind them.

I like the range of stories included. There are 64 in total, 32 each from the Old and New Testaments. They are straightforward, simple retellings, with no attempt to add any sort of doctrinal "spin". And best of all, Cherub likes them.

Alphabet Bags

I have been tossing the story sack idea around a bit more, and have decided that when the new school year starts in September I am going to try putting together alphabet bags for Little Cherub. I'm not in the least bothered whether she learns her letters this early, but she is at a stage where she loves any sort of activities she can do with me and I think this will give enough structure to keep me on track and motivated ... and she is showing enough interest in letters that I think it will appeal to her.

I love the idea of using the Serendipity Alphabet Path stories with her as a framework, and think this would tie in well with putting together a bag based on each letter of the alphabet. I brainstormed the first few letters and I'm sure it would be easy to come up with enough to keep her busy for a week or more. This is what I thought of putting in for the letter "A":

• A copy of the Alphabet Path story Meet Mrs Applebee
• Angelina Ballerina (Katherine Holabird)
• Alfie and Annie Rose (Shirley Hughes)
• Angels, Angels Everywhere (Tomie de Paola)
• The Apple Trees (Vivien French)
• How to Make an Apple Pie and See The World (Marjorie Priceman)
• Pictures (printed and laminated) ... St. Anne, Guardian Angel (with prayer), Apples by Cezanne
• CD of Appley-Dappley's Nursery Rhymes (Beatrix Potter) - I have this as part of a Beatrix Potter CD collection
• Objects beginning with "A" ... apple, aeroplane, angel, ant
• Colouring pages of things beginning with "A"
  
• Angelina Ballerina DVD
• Recipe for apple pie
• Letter "A" pastry cutter
• Letter "A" rubber stamp
  
• Angel beanie baby
• An "A" related game - I'm very tempted by this Angelina Ballerina UNO game

I think she would love this!

Story Sacks: Testing the Water

After thinking about story sacks at the weekend, I decided to dip a toe in with Cherub yesterday. We had a clear morning and I wanted to do some activities with her, but I am not good at getting myself organised in advance so it needed to be something I could pull together easily. I am gradually building up a list of simple ideas for celebrating different feasts and seasons. Checking that, I found sun-related ideas for June 21st I could use for the beginning of summer and threw together a story sack and a craft activity tray.

Into the story sack (a cloth bag that once contained a set of bed linen) went:

• The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow
• Skip Through the Seasons by Stella Blackstone
• Summer Story (Brambly Hedge) by Jill Barklem
• Flower Fairies of the Summer by Cicely Mary Barker
• This sun colouring page
• A sun rubber stamp

Onto the tray (a small wooden one I found when clearing out the kitchen) went:

• Coloured paper
• A paper plate
• Yellow paint and paintbrush
• Bottle of glue
• Scissors
• Pencil

... to make this handprint sun. In my experience doing any sort of structured craft with a toddler or preschooler goes much more smoothly if everything is ready to hand before getting the child involved - otherwise you can guarantee that things will take an interesting turn in your absence collecting missing items! Trays are a great way to get everything together and have endless possibilities. (Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning is the queen of activity trays ... check out some of her ideas here, and here, and here for inspiration.)

Cherub was very pleased to get a bag "like N's" and loved digging through it to see what was inside. We looked at the summer months in Skip Through The Seasons (a simple book with a double-page picture for each month, with items to spot), read The Sun Egg and looked at a couple of flower fairies before she wanted to move on to playing with the stamp. I have dangled Brambly Hedge books at her a couple of times but she hasn't been ready to bite yet, and obviously wasn't this time either. With hindsight I realised it would have been fun to put an orange and a small carton of orange juice in the bag to go with The Sun Egg.

After stamping we moved away from the bag and on to the craft tray. We drew round her hands, then I cut out hand shapes while she painted the paper plate yellow. When that was done she painted the colouring page and her stamped suns, then we turned to making "sunny" fairy cakes (yellow food colouring and yellow icing). Altogether we probably got about two hours of happy, focused activity out in return for a few minutes preparation, using books and other bits that I already had to hand.

I think for now I am going to put together other random bags as the fancy takes me, with the aim of having one ready to produce whenever she wants something to do and I don't have any other ideas. In the longer term I have - as Blackadder would say - a cunning plan. Letter bags. More on that later.

PS. I was a bad blogger and didn't remember to take any photos.

Story Sacks

I looked after a friend's little boy yesterday and thanks to him made a discovery ... story sacks. N is four and in his first term at school - afternoons only - so we did the school run with him, and it turned out that Friday was story sack changeover day.

Story sacks are a simple idea for sharing books with young children, and were originally conceived as a way of helping and encouraging adults who might not otherwise do so to read with their children. Since then the project has expanded and many schools now use story sacks, often supported by local community groups who put the bags together. They can also be bought prefilled like these, which I think are the ones used by N's school. This description comes from the Literacy Trust:

A story sack is a large cloth bag containing a children's book with supporting materials to stimulate reading activities and make shared reading a memorable and enjoyable experience. The sack contains soft toys of the book's main characters, and props and scenery that parents and other adults can use with children to bring a book to life, even if the adult's reading skills are limited. The sack might include a non-fiction book on the same theme, an audio-tape of the story, a language-based game and a short guide containing questions to ask, words to consider and other ways to extend the reading activity.

As N swapped his story sack, I got to see two with completely different themes - Jack and the Beanstalk, and Numbers (based on a book of the rhyme "This old man, he played one..."). The numbers bag contained the nursery rhyme book, Usborne's First Book of Numbers, a number matching puzzle, a CD with number based songs, and a glorious old man soft toy with ten numbered pockets in his coat, each holding one of the items from the song. Jack and the Beanstalk had the story, a non-fiction book about beans, a bag of beans, a board game and soft toys of Jack, the giant and the hen. Each bag had an activity card with suggestions for parents to use with the child.

Seeing these two bags sent my imagination into overdrive. While the swish, ready-made versions are prohibitively expensive for home use, story sacks would be very easy to put together at home and could be used in a number of different ways. Preschoolers are probably the ideal age, they but could work for a variety of ages, from board books for toddlers to chapter-book based sacks for older children. They could be based on an individual book or a theme.

After seeing Cherub's reaction to N's story sacks, I'm going to test a couple of home made ones out on her. I have a drawstring cloth bag that is just the right size, and a few ideas for contents.

Watch this space ...

April 23rd: St. George's Day

For St. George's Day on Thursday I'm thinking we will :

• Read Saint George and the Dragon by Geraldine McCaughrean (or just look at the pictures if the story is way over Cherub's head)
• Make a handprint dragon
• Make fairy cakes and use red and white icing to make a St. George's cross

Again, there are a many ideas for activities and crafts at Activity Village.

For more about Saint George, see this post that I wrote back in 2006. And here is a prayer to St. George.

April 22nd: Earth Day

I am trying to organise myself to do some simple calendar related activities with Cherub. Tomorrow is Earth Day so I'm planning to:

• Look at a globe
• Read The Story of Creation by Jane Ray (lovely illustrations!)
• Plant some flowers
• Colour some pictures
• Play simple recycling board game (found this in Asda for 99 pence!)
  

You can find lots more ideas at Activity Village.

Book Review: Teach Me To Do It Myself

Teach Me To Do It Myself: Montessori Activities For You and Your Child, by Maja Pitamic, published by Dorling Kindersley. (I think it has been republished under another title - I Can Do It: Play-and-Learn Activities to Help Your Child Discover the World the Montessori Way)

If you want Montessori for Dummies, this book is for you. If you want educational theory, lots of information about Maria Montessori and her philosophy, and the whole Montessori caboodle then it isn't. Teach Me Do It Myself has a limited remit, but what it does it does very well indeed.

The book has a simple format. It is a collection of activities to do with your child, divided into five sections: Life Skills, Developing the Senses, Language Development, Numeracy Skills, and Science Skills. I have read enough about Montessori to see that the activites are all based on the standard Montessori sequence, but the author uses layman's language rather than Montessori terms ("life skills" instead of practical life, "graduated building blocks" rather than pink tower). It completely removes the whole Montessori mystique and what is left is clear, simple and looks very do-able. At the beginning there is a brief (very brief!) introduction to Maria Montessori and her method, a double-page, bullet-pointed list of instructions as to how to use the book, and a set of frequently asked questions. After that you simply get on and do it.

Within each section the activities are presented in sequence of difficulty, and each activity ends with some extension ideas. Almost all the activities in the book can be put together using items you are likely to have at home without requiring a great deal of preparation time. A few worksheets are included at the back of the book so that you can make simple manipulatives, including a very basic set of red and blue number rods using thick card.

Each activity is set out in the same clear and simple format:

• A brief introduction explaining what skill the activity is intended to teach or develop
• A "tip box" with suggestions on how best to present the activity
• A list of what is needed for the activity
• Simple bullet pointed instructions on how to present the activity.
  
• Other related activities to try

The activities are suitable for children from age two or three up to five. The author avoids giving age suggestions for individual activities so that children can progress at their own pace.

I have toyed with the idea of using Montessori at various times and did dabble a little when Angel was young, but I soon gave up because I couldn't justify buying lots of expensive Montessori items and doing it myself just seemed too overwhelming (I think I gave up making sandpaper letters somewhere around F!). This book makes the idea of dipping a toe into Montessori seem both attractive and manageable. After the Easter break I am going to try a few of the activities with Cherub and see how it goes.

Activity Village

Looking for Pancake Day activities last month, I found a good, free resource for celebrating special days throughout the year: Activity Village.

Although it is a UK site, it also includes dates from the US and other calendars. Looking ahead over the next few weeks you can find links to crafts, colouring pages, puzzles, games and other activities for:

• Easter (12th April)
• 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession (21st April)
• Earth Day (22nd April)
• St. George's Day (23rd April)
• Teacher Appreciation Week, US (4th-8th May)
• Children's Day, Japan (5th May)
• Mother's Day, US (10th May)

Have fun!

Book Review: The Mother's Day Mice

In the UK Mother's Day falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, so I bought The Mother's Day Mice by Eve Bunting to share with Little Cherub. It is illustrated by Jan Brett, which is a guarantee that it will be good to look at. The story is cute and simple: three mice go in search of presents for their mother for Mother's Day. The littlest mouse is prevented from getting the honeysuckle he wants by a cat, but thinks of something extra special instead. A nice gentle story for preschoolers. I particularly like the way the three little mouse brothers are willing to share credit for their gifts.

Rough Guide to Potty Training

(mainly for Melanie ... feel free to skip!)

For what it's worth, here is my guide to potty training small girls ...

(1) Look for physical and mental readiness. These have to come together. If one or the other is missing, forget it. However convinced you are that she is physically capable, if her head says she isn't you will go nowhere fast. How do you tell if she is ready? Her nappies should stay dry for some time, and moderately regular bowel habits help. Watch for indications that she is aware when she does something in her nappy. Age is a good clue: many girls are physically ready at two; most by two and a half. As for mental readiness, take your cues from her. Is she aware of what potties and toilets are for? Talk up what grown ups and big girls do. Does she want to imitate you (or in our case, big sisters)? Does she seem interested or reluctant?

(2) Decide to go for it. Talk it up. Let her pick big girl underwear, or choose some you know she would like. Buy a potty and a toddler seat for the bathroom (if you haven't already) and acclimatise her to it. Pick a time where you know you can stay home for at least a couple of days. Warn her in advance ... "on Monday you are going to start wearing big girl panties and use the potty". If this results in shrieks and horror, wait a while!

(3) Pick an incentive. There are times when bribery is a vital part of parenthood. Potty training is one of them. A small but immediate incentive ("every time you use the potty you will get ..." probably works better than a larger, longer-term one ("once you are potty trained you can have ..."), because toddlers are immediate little people. Cherub has been getting chocolate buttons. Once the potty habit is there it won't disappear just because the incentive stops.

(4) On "P-Day", first thing in the morning remove nappy, replace with panties, point in direction of potty ... and wait for disaster to strike. Most little ones need to have a few accidents before they can begin to work out the mechanics of control. They are used to just letting it all spill out without a thought, and they need to work out what is happening, how it happens, how it feels before it happens, how to stop it happening, and how to make it happen for themselves. Twice over.

(5) Keep the potty wherever your toddler is going to spend most of her time. Also keep cleaning cloths, paper kitchen towel, wipes, and spare panties to hand. Potty disasters can spread rapidly as a confused toddler blunders around - you need to get in there and clean up fast!

(6) When the inevitable "accident" happens, calmly and brightly say something like "Oh look! A wee! Quickly to the potty!". You may be too late, but she will soon get the idea. Calm is essential, as small girls can get quite distressed by accidents. Explain that it is all OK and she will soon learn to get it in the potty. Calm is hard, as you clean up the seventh accident of the day. Offer it up. Cherub quickly worked out how to stop in mid-stream; re-starting the flow was harder ... but she managed it once the first day and again on the second. We got through twelve pairs of panties in the first two days, a lot of mopping up, and a lot of washing. Then in the evening of the second day she sat on the potty and produced a wee on demand. Triumph! Chocolate buttons! The next day she was taking herself to the potty, and since then she has only had two slight accidents when she didn't quite get there in time, both in the evening when she was tired.

(7) Play nap time by ear. Cherub insisted she wanted to stay in panties at nap time, and has consistently woken dry. Some toddlers might feel more secure if they have a nappy on at nap time for a while.

(8) If you try potty training for a few days and she is not getting it, give up and try again in a couple of months. She is probably not ready and there is no point trying to push it. We did this three or four times with Star from the age of two onwards, and she finally trained in a couple of days at 33 months. In fact, you can often tell within the first day or two that it just isn't going to happen - either the toddler appears totally unaware of what is going on, completely refuses to go near the potty, or gets hugely stressed. We had one abortive attempt with Cherub in the autumn, when she appeared enthusiastic to start with, but rapidly decided the whole thing was a Very Bad Idea. This time round it was clear from Day 1 that she was willing, if not always able.

(9) Wees and poos are not the same. Poos are often more of a challenge, as they can come as rather a shock to a toddler meeting them up close for the first time. Again, play it by ear. Poo accidents are often more distressing - to both parent and toddler! Give lots of encouragement, and maybe a bigger and better incentive. Cherub is definitely having more trouble with poos. We have had a couple of bath accidents (oh! trauma!), and near-the-potty accidents. She doesn't want to admit that a poo is on its way, which makes things tricky. Watch for poo-faces!

(10) Going out without a nappy is a hurdle that has to be faced. Take plenty of spare clothes and things to clean up with in case of emergency. Then grit your teeth and go! Cherub has done brilliantly when we have been out and about over the last couple of days, but is determined to visit as many different facilities as possible - preferably more than once.

(11) Go for it! If you are potty training, don't do it half-heartedly. Switching back and forward between underwear and pull-ups only confuses toddlers and makes the whole process take longer. (This bit of advice comes from K-next-door, who is manager of the local playgroup and deals with lots of potty-training small people.)

(12) Don't panic!

Of course, this is based on my personal experience, and all toddlers are different. I have been lucky in that I haven't had a difficult trainee. I used much the same process for both Cherub and Star, but Angel did it her own way and entirely on her own timetable. At two and a half she simply announced that she was using the toilet now, thank you, and didn't need nappies any more. However, she wanted a nappy on for her nap and at night, and would only do a poo in her nappy. About three months later, she decided it was time for poos to go in the toilet; then a few months after that, she decided against the nappy at night. She only ever had one accident.

Play Time

These days Little Cherub spends much of her time engrossed in intense pretend play. I thought it would be interesting to jot down a few notes about how she currently plays, and then to see how it develops over time.

• Favourite toys - Playmobil and other small figures, dolls' house, baby dolls, play food.

• Imaginative play - lots of time talking to her little people and staging conversations between them. I overhear things like " You have been very naughty and you have to go to bed", and "You can sit at the computer now". Her people have a lot of pretend birthdays, complete with pretend birthday cake and candles. They talk to each other, but she doesn't yet make up names, so a Mummy addresses her children as "Girl" or "Boy" or "Baby". She also alters her voice according to who is talking. She likes setting up domestic scenes - people sitting at a table, children put to bed, families going for a ride in a car. She will get dressed up in outdoor gear to go to pretend shops to buy imaginary sweets. I have to open the imaginary wrapping for her, then help eat the invisible contents. Lots of pretend meals with play food. She will ask what we want, then "cook" it. This morning she spent half an hour in bed pretending to visit houses with a couple of soft toys.
  

• Playing with dolls - lots of role play, doing all the things you would expect with babies ... feeding, dressing, bathing, taking them for walks, changing nappies.

• Adores her Peppa Pig beanie baby (the one pictured sitting on the door ledge of the washer in the post below). Takes Peppa everywhere, and has lots of conversations with her.

• Loves games. Mainly simple "collecting" games ... Lotto, Tummy Ache (collecting food cards to flll a meal board without getting any tummy ache cards), one where you collect parts of a bug by rolling a die and matching numbers, another collecting jungle animals using a spinner. She likes animal dominoes, but sometimes insists she has to have all the "double" dominoes, which kind of messes up the game! She is just starting to get the idea of board games and loves The Peter Rabbit Radish Game we bought back from the Lake District for her, even though it is really too complex. If she is in the mood she can just about manage to count spaces on the board, but mostly she wants us to do it for her.

• Not in a puzzle phase at the moment. She went through a spell last year of loving jigsaws, but that has passed and she rarely takes them out.
  

• Building toys - Duplo, sticklebricks, blocks - are also off her playing radar at the moment. Star and my brother often get the Lego out on Sundays and she sometimes asks for it at other times.
  

• Also not particularly into drawing and colouring, after a spell when she got pencils and crayons out every day. Interesting to see how these things go through a period of intensity and then fade for a while.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World
by Marjorie Priceman
rating: 5 of 5 stars

Little Cherub loves baking, books about baking, and - apparently - books with leopards in. This ticks all her boxes. It is also a wonderfully clever take on teaching where different items of food come from. Both fun and educational.

View all my GoodReads reviews.

Patrick Paints a Picture

Patrick Paints a Picture
by Saviour Pirotta
rating: 4 of 5 stars

A simple but effective book for young children just mastering their colours. Patrick wants to paint a cornfield, and as various animals appear he needs more and more colours. Gives the little one the chance to identify the colours, and teaches basic colour mixing. Very popular with my Little Cherub.

View all my GoodReads reviews.

Parents' Review: A PNEU Nursery School

I have been using Instapaper (possibly my favourite iPod Touch application) to read some of the Parents' Review articles available at the Ambleside Online website, and plan to share some quotes as I read.

This is from A PNEU Nursery School by Hilda Eleanor Breckels (1969). The children began each morning with a 40 minute period of free play, then:

As soon as this is over and everything is put away, with the help of the children, they voluntarily separate into their age groups and run pell-mell to their group places, glad to have seen the last of free play for that morning.

Free play has wearied them by the end. Each child has been left to its own devices. It has had to make up its own mind about everything; whom to play with, or which sharing group to join, what play equipment to choose, or whether to dare a big adventure on the apparatus, or dare to knock on the door of the playhouse to see what's going on inside it.

At last all are tired of being creatively busy, and of being left to manage all alone. The children are also tired of each other, in need of a comforting grown-up with a kind voice for telling all about things to do.

The need is for quiet and a spell of uplift, through close companionship with adults. This is especially so with regard to speech. This needs frequent uplift in the early years and the under-fives cannot get this when with contemporaries.

For speech uplift, under-fives need to be often with grown-ups who are light-hearted and good at making conversation with the very young.

I must now tell you about our quiet time, because it follows all that noisy play. Some mornings we sing a hymn and say prayers. Others, we associate God with human relationships, or with the seasons and other aspects of nature. We also tell stories of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and Old Testament babes and boys and girls. We learn to be hushed. Reverent.

Thus are they quietened. They are now eager for group activities when they will be in the close care of grown-ups who tell them what to do and how to do it. While carefully and expressively telling the listening children what to do, the group teachers are giving that important uplift to speech.

Besides being training time for skills in speech, these activities in small groups give carefully graded steps in the preliminaries to reading, word-building and number.

That is all done through play. The knowledge is threaded, as it were, through a game, by means of the appropriate teaching aids. If the children are ready, they will learn the little lesson. If they are not, they just enjoy the game. They usually do both.

Being a PNEU Nursery School, we do no more than help the children to play the game. We leave all else to the children's powers of attention, imagination, reflection, judgment and so on.

My interest was piqued by the assertion that children find too much free play and free association with other children tiring, and need it to be balanced by structured, adult led time. Also by the way in which learning activities were simply play, from which the children took whatever they were ready for.

Hand Painting

My planned weekly rhythm has Wednesday as art and craft day. Shamefully I haven't got the paints out for Little Cherub since she used them for the first time back in June (this is why I need a weekly rhythm). When I asked if she would like to paint she was thrilled. This time after painting a little with brushes she decided to explore hand painting - she recently saw a clip on TV of children painting with their hands and feet, and it obviously had an impact. She wanted to start with red and green paint, then added in blue, and right at the end yellow.

"Look! I'm hand painting!"



"Oh dear! Mess."


The clean up went swimmingly. Rather too swimmingly. Being very petite, Cherub couldn't quite get her hands under the tap even when standing on her super-tall IKEA plastic stool. The fingers could reach but the rest of her hand couldn't. I lifted the washing up bowl full of water down onto her stool so that she could finish her hands while I cleaned up the paint pots and brushes. Once her hands were clean I took my eye off her ... then realised belatedly that she had decided to wash her apron in the bowl. With rather a lot of overflow. While I tried to mop up, she slipped over on the wet floor and had to be removed shrieking from the kitchen to drier ground.

A Little Bit of Rhythm

Tomorrow we leave for a week in Cornwall. I'm hoping it won't be too wet a week, as Little Cherub is frantic to "go seaside NOW!!!". Playing on the beach in the rain is not my idea of fun. When we get back, there will only be three more days before Angel and Star go back to school, and it will just be Little Cherub and I at home again. How we are going to miss our big girls!

I think it would be good for both of us to add a little rhythm to our days when we get back into the term time routine, and I have a simple plan. The girls leave for school in the morning at about 8am. After they go I will to read to Cherub for as long as she wants, then do housework (Cherub can either play or "help"), followed by a different activity for each day of the week:

• Monday - cooking
• Tuesday - nature (visit country park, gardening or indoor activity, depending on the weather)
• Wednesday - art and craft
• Thursday - out and about (the zoo, the farm, playdates, library and so on)
• Friday - music (Jo Jingles class)

I am one of those people who has to have a plan, or nothing will happen. If I make a list of nature and art activities in advance and make sure I have any supplies needed, there is a fighting chance we will do them; if I try to be spontaneous, forget it. I am hoping this pattern of daily activities will give our week just the right amount of structure.

Beatrix Potter's Birthday

Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Tom Kitten and the Two Bad Mice are current favourites with Little Cherub, so when I noticed this morning that Google's logo included Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor I had to investigate ... and discovered that yesterday was Beatrix Potter's birthday.

In honour of Miss Potter's 142nd birthday (albeit a day late), I thought I'd post a few links. Lots of stuff here that I'll be coming back to with Little Cherub over the next few years.

• The World of Peter Rabbit has games to play online, colouring pages to print out and information about Beatrix Potter and her world.
• Pay a virtual visit to the World of Beatrix Potter Attraction by Lake Windermere (we visited when Angel and Star were little and they loved it).
• Read or listen to books online at Wired for Books
• The Victoria and Albert Museum has a large collection of Beatrix Potter's pictures and manuscripts. Loads of stuff online, ranging from information about Beatrix as a book designer to sketches of Mr. McGregor's garden.
• A six week Beatrix Potter rabbit trail written by Elizabeth Foss and Melissa Wiley
  
• A long list of Beatrix Potter resources from Mary G at St. Athanasius Academy
  
• An author study of Beatrix Potter designed for 1st graders
  

The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Anything by Beatrix Potter is a classic, in my opinion, so deserves five stars. Her insistence that her books be published in a size suitable for little hands was a stroke of genius ... I'm sure the size is what caused Little Cherub to pick this off the shelf. Then it was love at first read. She has been pursuing us round the house clutching the book and demanding "Read Two Blind Mice" (a little confusion with the nursery rhyme there!). While the language is complex for little people, it accustoms their ears to a more challenging turn of phrase, and the pictures help them to get the gist of the story.

We have since added The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny into her book pile ... it is lovely to rediscover Beatrix Potter with a new little one.

But Excuse Me That is My Book by Lauren Child

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charlie and Lola are new to me with Little Cherub. She latched on to the book at the library because she has seen bits of the TV series and recognised the characters. I'm not keen on spin-off books from TV shows, but - like Thomas the Tank Engine - this is one of those series where the books came first and later spawned the TV version.

But Excuse Me That is My Book is written entirely in the voices of the characters - patient big brother Charlie and his little sister Lola, who wants HER book and can't get her head around the idea that it is a library book and someone else may have borrowed it.

Lola says, "But Charlie, my book is lost! It is completely not there!"

I say, "Lola, remember this is a library so someone must have borrowed it."

Lola says, "But Beetles, Bugs and Butterlies is MY book."

I say, "But it's not your library. Someone else obviously wanted to read your book."

Lola says, "But they can't. It's MY book."

The text runs on in this vein rather breathlessly. Whether you find the effect irritating or appealing is a matter of taste, as is the switching around between different fonts and the rather jumpy layout. It is very much a love it or hate it book. Cherub loves it and I enjoy it. Tevye doesn't.

Painting Time

I talked a while ago about wanting to do more art with Little Cherub than I had with her sisters. I bought First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos by Mary Ann Kohl, read it ... and did nothing! Inspired by Melanie's post about painting with Bella, her just turned two year old, I decided the time to let Cherub loose with paint had arrived.Last autumn I picked up a child's easel for a song at a nearly-new sale, and stocked up on squeezy bottles of paint, brushes and paint pots from the Early Learning Centre. I decided to start Cherub with two colours - she chose red and blue. I put each colour in a matching pot, with a matching brush, but didn't give her any instructions beyond saying "here's a blue brush for the blue paint, and a red brush for the red paint".


She was thrilled to see the effect of the paint on the paper.


To begin with, she kept the colours quite separate. This was her first masterpiece ...


By the time she finished she was mixing the colours together, and experimenting with putting the brushes into different colours. We added yellow at her request (she currently calls all colours "blue" and pointed at the yellow asking for "more blue"!)


She spent around 40 minutes totally focused on painting, working mostly silently with occasional happy noises.


The first time she got paint on her hand she was a bit worried, then there was a bit more alarm at paint on her clothes (second-hand trousers and a cheap t-shirt I'm keeping for messy art) and when she missed the paper with the paint. After I reassured her she was fine.

Like Melanie, I'm going to aim for an art project every week.