This recently launched picture book is uplifting and joyful. It encourages the reader to imagine a world where everyone looks the same, all the food tastes the same, where we all speak the same language… wouldn’t that be so boring?
The book goes on to celebrate diversity and inclusivity in an engaging and fun way that kids will absolutely relate to. It encourages children to be curious about the diverse world we live in and to enjoy our differences.
Written by Uju Asika and illustrated by Jennie Poh, this book is beautifully written and illustrated, bursting with colour and joy! If you have any kiddies in your life, this book is unmissable.
Whenever we have school holidays coming up, I always try and order at least one new book for Anya. It’s just something I started doing a while ago but now it’s become a holiday habit. The holidays have somehow become my prompt to get her some new books and with half term coming up next week, I went looking. I don’t always get a story book but it can be an activity book, a joke book, an art book or anything that looks interesting and will keep her occupied for a while.
I bought The School of Art last December for Anya as she is interested in creating. She recently picked it up which is what reminded me of what a great book this is. Since she’s picked it up, she hasn’t been able to put it down. If you’re interested in a tool for teaching art to children or you just have kids who love art, I haven’t come across anything better than this book.
One of the things I try and stock up on for the longer school holidays is books for Anya. I mix it up with some new books as well as pull out old books that she hasn’t looked at for a while. This is exactly what I did before the long Easter/Spring break. I always try and include a few different types of books to keep her interested so I’ll maybe include a puzzle book, a story book and a joke book or a fact book.
Recently, I was so excited to discover this gem of a book. While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a book we’re all very familiar with, it was finding this (fairly) rare edition that got me so excited. One look at this book and I knew it had to be added to our shelves.
Yay, it’s World Book Day! What have your kids dressed up as? We love this day so much and get excited about it from weeks before – choosing a character, planning the outfit and eventually making it. This year Anya is going as Violet Beauregarde – our school will celebrate tomorrow so we are still putting the finishing touches on the outfit. We just got a tracksuit in a slightly larger size, dyed it violet and will stuff her up with cushions and padding to make her look like a blueberry!
To celebrate this day and our love of books I wanted to share 9 must have children’s books. Most of these books are ideal for ages 5 – 9 years but many can be enjoyed by younger and older and they are all keepers. We’ve got them all and I can’t rate them highly enough:
Anna Hibiscus lives in Africa, amazing Africa… so the first story begins and many of the stories that come after.
As it’s World Book Day this week, I wanted to start the week with a book series we are loving. We are slowly moving on from picture books, so I am always looking for interesting chapter books that still have pictures and quite big text. We recently discovered the Anna Hibiscus series of books and they are a breath of fresh air.
Hands up, who is maths phobic? It turns out that a lot of us parents are and that we can unintentionally pass on this math phobia to our kids.
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on language and reading. Every parent I know reads to their kids at bedtime and usually started when their kids were babies. But why not the same importance for maths? If I had to choose between the two, I would say that maths is a more important skill to understand and feel confident about. I’ve read a lot recently about this and it really resonated with me. Up till now Anya has loved and enjoyed maths but recently she started struggling with the concept of division and I started hearing phrases like ‘I can’t do it’ and ‘I just don’t understand’. That’s when I went hunting for a maths book for kids to help make maths more fun for her.
When I find a good picture book I end up buying a few copies to give as birthday gifts too. Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam is one of these picture books that is just delightful. Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam are a pair of robber dogs. In the dead of night they creep around town with big plans to rob banks, book shops and bike shops. But… they are hopeless robbers! After one too many failed grand plans, Shifty McGifty & Slippery Sam realise that crime doesn’t pay but cupcakes do! The book is written in rhyming text and is a sweet and funny little story with a simple moral take out. The illustrations are playful and fun and this book is equally great to read to kids or let 5+ readers read by themselves.
Are your kids in to myths and facts? My seven year old is obsessed with them so we have recently made up a dinner table game called ‘myth or fact?’. We each take a turn to come up with a statement and the others have to guess whether it’s a myth or a fact. The statement can be about anything, any subject, any topic – the challenge lies in coming up with facts that sound like myths and vice versa. It’s really fun seeing what Anya will say as she sometimes comes up with things that neither Richard or I are sure whether it’s a myth or a fact. And other times her statements are so random, they are hilarious! She gets some of her info from one of her current favourite books – The Amazing Human Body Detectives – that I wrote about last year.
That book was such a hit in our home and yours (so many readers emailed me to say they had bought it and their kids loved it too) that when I discovered the other book in this series I had to get it for Anya and of course share it with you. Called Bug Detective: Amazing facts, myths and quirks of nature – this Bug Detective book is packed with interesting facts and myths about bugs, insects and minibeasts. Did you know that worms don’t have lungs or that ladybirds have poisonous knees? Or if you weighed all the ants in the world, they would weigh more than humans (wow, that I did not know!). All the info is presented in a fun and engaging way with great illustrations. There is a lot of info on each page but it’s broken up in to bite sized chunks making it easy for kids to read and understand.
The Bug Detective book also comes with a magnifying glass so kids can search for the extra, often tiny, details on some of the pages – making it even more fun to read. I highly recommend it especially for inquisitive kids who will devour this book and spend hours buried in it! If you’re in the US, you can find the book here and in the UK find it here.
Ebabee Likes is a style guide for babies, kids, teens and their mamas. It’s all about inspiration, ideas and indulging yourself and your brood. It’s written by me ~ Nomita ~ a style loving girl from Mumbai who now live’s in London. Read More...
