reading with children – Picture Book Dragons

Inspector Penguin Investigates by Eoin McLaughlin

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Siobhan

Inspector Penguin Investigates: A Penguin with a nose for fishy goings on

You know the frustrating feeling when a book you expected to love lets you down? I’ve recently had the opposite experience when a book which I had zero expectations for proved a smash hit with my children.

I bought Inspector Penguin Investigates by Eoin McLaughlin and Ross Collins in a hurry when the cashier at Blackwells pointed out I was one book off getting a 3 for 2 deal after the children chose a picture book each, and if you’re going to grab a picture book from a table, then the one with a penguin dressed in the manner of Sherlock Holmes is an obvious choice. They both agreed that it should be their bedtime story that night instead of the books they chose themselves, and they’ve been asking for it as their bedtime story with an alarmingly high frequency ever since. I can even tell when their father is reading it as their bedtime story from the squeals and giggles that come out of them.

Inspector Penguin Investigates opens with the disappearance of the Diamond del Mondo from Baron von Buffetworth’s top secret and completely secure mega safe in an impenetrable castle. A detective is called in to investigate, and even though the penguin who arrives at the door doesn’t look like an inspector at first, they provide him with a hat and a magnifying glass and tell him to go off and find some clues. Inspector Penguin isn’t very good at finding clues, but he does have a finely-honed talent for finding fish while the young readers spot a series of clues which lead to the culprit on each page. Remarkably enough, Inspector Penguin does solve the crime at the end of the book, but who’s to say whether that’s because we’ve underestimated his talents, Columbo style, or whether it’s because there’s a large barrel of fish near the final clue.

Inspector Penguin Investigates is an uproariously funny book to read with young children, especially those who fancy themselves as great detectives. It’s great fun to appear absolutely baffled about what’s happened to the diamond, and the children take great pride in pointing out all the clues their silly parents have missed and explaining how the crime went down. I’m excited to check out Eoin McLaughlin’s other books, The Case of the Missing Cake and Secret Agent Elephant.

Big Feelings

The Grumpy Fairies by Beth Stevens

Posted on January 30, 2022January 27, 2022 by Siobhan

I often think the best picture books for kids are the ones in which they recognise themselves, so I think The Grumpy Fairies by Beth Stevens has something for all children and their carers, because the little fairies in this book are proper grumpy. Or as Beth Stevens puts it “I mean foot-stompy, frowny, bottom-lip-sticking-outy kind of grumpy. I mean ‘it’s just one of those days’ grumpy.”

Yes, these little fairies are so grumpy that they don’t want to help with their fairy jobs. They stomp noisily through the woods, and are far too busy being grumpy to help the mouse gather acorns for its burrow, take the snails for a walk or help clean up the hedgehog poo! But living in the woods is a goblin, and his favourite food is fairies – not the syrupy sweet sickly good and helpful fairies, but the sweet and sour grumpy fairies – and it’s not long before our grumpy little friends are forced to confront their own behaviour!

It’s the classic face plant of grumpy despair that gets me with this

It came as no surprise to me that Beth Stevens won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Best Illustrated Book 2021 with The Grumpy Fairies. The pictures of the fairies are guaranteed to make anyone with a slightly grumpy on occasions small child giggle, from the stamping feet to the face plant on floor tantrum, the poses are highly recognisable, and the lack of co-operation is gently poked fun at with a huge amount of warmth and good humour.

I like to pick out The Grumpy Fairies as a bedtime read on days when the terrors have been particularly uncooperative – I mean come on guys, I was only asking you to put the pen lids back on, it’s not like I was making you clean up hedgehog poo!

Big Feelings

The Bad Mood and The Stick by Lemony Snickett

Posted on January 27, 2022January 27, 2022 by Siobhan

The best facial expressions in picture books? That’s a bad mood!

When Curly’s mother won’t let her have an ice cream, she gets in a bad mood. Until she pokes her brother Napoleon with a stick, and the bad mood passes to her mother, who cheers up when she sees a man called Lou fall in a muddy puddle, at which point the bad mood passes along to him.

The Bad Mood and the Stick written by Lemony Snickett and illustrated by Matt Forsythe follows a bad mood cloud as it passes from person to person as a humble stick sparks a series of chance encounters that cause the characters moods to change, though not always in the way you would expect! It’s a great visual model of how events can affect people’s emotions, with the bad mood cloud being more of a marker than a character, though it does take on something of a persona of it’s own towards the end of the story as it lurks around the corner waiting to catch someone unaware. I love this book as a fun way to spark conversations about feelings, and the cause-and-effect relationship between actions, events and feelings.

The bad mood travels around the world but comes full circle and back to the cat

Lemony Snickett’s writing is well-paced and good humoured, but the nostalgia tinged illustrations by Matt Forsythe are the cherry on the top of The Bad Mood and the Stick for me, and complement the text perfectly. My favourite page spread is when the bad mood travels around the world and you get to piece together a vague chain of events that might have happened from who has the bad mood cloud throughout the sequence, which as well as being great fun to discuss with children is great for developing early years visual literacy.

I think this book is a great addition to the home library if you’re starting a collection of fun picture books, as you can see from the battered cover, ours has been very well loved!

Lemony Snickett and Matt Forsythe’s bad mood lying in wait

Poetry

Reading a poem a day with kids

Posted on January 9, 2022January 9, 2022 by Siobhan

I Am The Seed That Grew The Tree: A nature poem for every day of the year edited by Fiona Waters and illustrated by Fran Preston-Gannon on a colourful rug

Happy New Year! It’s been a while since we’ve made new year’s resolutions, but this year we have one. The Terrors received I Am The Seed That Grew The Tree – A Nature Poem for Every Day of The Year edited by Fiona Walters and illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon for Christmas from their Welsh grandfather, and we’ve been reading each day’s poem between the bedtime story and lullabies. So that’s the resolution, a poem a day for the year with the hard work done for us and all we have to do is leave the book in the right place to remind us.

So far it’s going really well and we’ve been enjoying it, and the Terrors are now quite vocal in demanding their poem at bedtime. That might be because it’s another way to eke out an extra five minutes before lights out, but we’re rolling with it. And we’re already getting some poetic criticism from the overtired terrors, in the form of, I really liked that one, or, that was really pretty, and my favourite, “IS THAT IT??? THAT WAS REALLY SHORT! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST ANOTHER PAGE!!!!” (that was January by John Foster, and personally I thought it was perfectly formed…)

Hopefully reading poetry with children when they’re quite small will prevent that moment in secondary school where they’re confronted with poetry for exam purposes and panic like a horse sighting a cobra. I’ve always loved sifting for the hidden meanings in poems, but I know some people really hate that, so if they can enjoy reading the poems as they stand for now and appreciate them regardless of whether the snow they’re talking about it the kind they’d like to build a snowman in or a metaphor for the weight of possibility stretching out ahead of them then it’s fine.

We like our bedtime poems, and the book is beautiful.