The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb

We've been really enjoying The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb. It's the story of a little girl whose mother makes her a string of paper dolls and they name them 'Ticky and Tacky and Jackie the Backie and Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow' and take them on all sorts of adventures until they are untimely cut short by a little boy with a pair of scissors!

It's a simple story but touches on some very big themes, including remembering people who have died, and growing up to become a parent and the passing on of traditions. After the little boy cuts the paper dolls into pieces the text tells us that they 'flew into the little girl's memory' and in the little girl's memory we find all sorts of things including 'a kind granny'.

The text is slightly different to Julia Donaldson's usual fare and I really like it, it's rhythmic but not rhyming and I know from experience how hard it is to get that to work. I guess if anyone is going to do it well it would have to be Julia Donaldson!

I really like the artwork by Rebecca Cobb as well. I like the sketchy feel of it and the colour palette she uses. She also manages to show the movement of the paper dolls, which I think is a feat in itself!

I'd almost forgotten that you could make paper dolls, they're so easy to do, anyone can make them, even me! We've made quite a few sets and seeing Rosie play with them is fascinating, it's easy to see why this picture book came into being, it's the imaginative world of a little girl come to life.

Favourite Christmas picture books!

It's nearly Christmas so here are a few of my favourite Christmas picture books. There are loads out this year and we haven't got round to reading them all by any means, in fact most of these are from previous years!

One that I haven't read yet but I am wishing for in my stocking is Alfie's Christmas. It looks wonderful! I am fairly confident that Rosie is going to receive it so we will snuggle up together and share it on Christmas day!

One of our very favourite Christmas books is Father Christmas Needs a Wee. It's got counting, Christmas and funny rhymes - it truly is a Christmas cracker of a book! I don't know why but even as an adult I get very excited seeing Father Christmas' house depicted. This year Random House have published Father Christmas Comes Up Trumps which looks equally fun.

Angelina's Christmas is a really sweet story about the old village postman being home alone and old and how Angelina and Henry cheer him up. Angelina's world lends itself to Christmas anyway with the nostalgic and beautiful illustrations.

We got The Christmas Show by Rebecca Patterson out of our library a couple of weeks ago and it has resonated with us since Rosie was in her first nativity play last week. She wasn't quite as forgetful as the main character in this book though! It's a nice gentle story about a school putting on their Christmas play. I love Rebecca Patterson's artwork, it's cheeky and cute!

I love the poem The Night Before Christmas and this version illustrated by Christian Birmingham is really lovely. The book we have is rather small - I wish I'd got a larger version (if there is one!) but it's still really nice.

Books for a one year old featuring Peepo Baby by Georgie Birkett

I'm revisiting some of the younger books at the moment with my one year old. The one she currently can't get enough of is Peepo Baby illustrated by Georgie Birkett. This one is a Bookstart book so is probably very well known!

I think it really helps that this book has very sturdy flaps which my child can pull and tug at as much as she likes. They are actually half pages so short of the book falling to pieces they are going to stay on. She loves trying to make a 'woof woof' noise for the dog hiding under one of the flaps. It's more like a 'oof, oof' whistling noise that she does through her nose but I know what she's attempting!

Another winner for her at the moment is Peekaboo Baby by Mandy Ross and Kate Merritt. It's a game she loves anyway and the fact it's in a book and she can look under the flaps to find the baby is great fun. These flaps are stuck on and not so sturdy but sellotape is wonderful stuff!

We also really like Is This My Nose by Georgie Birkett. The lovely combination of the big fold out mirror at the end and the pointing to body parts always makes her giggle!

There are quite a few more books she likes but these are the ones I have really noticed her engaging with and enjoying.

Spaghetti with the Yeti by Adam and Charlotte Guillain, illustrated by Lee Wildish

This is a great fun, rollicking read of a picture book. It's well told and the illustrations are great too. Rosie was a bit tentative when we first read it, I think she thought it might be scary but it's definitely not! It's a bit silly and slapstick, I think Rosie particularly likes the final scene where the main character, George and the Yeti share a tin of spaghetti.

The story of George setting off from his bedroom with his backpack and a tin of spaghetti in search of a Yeti strikes a chord with Rosie because at the moment she is constantly in the world of make-believe. It's all, 'Mummy, pretend I'm this and you're that and then...'. Actually it can be quite exhausting because it all changes so quickly!

George toils up the mountain path in search of the elusive Yeti and each time he thinks he's finally found him it turns out to be another large monster-like creature who is appalled that he would think they are the Yeti. Each one of them has their own opinion on what the Yeti likes to eat and by the end of the story George is trailing a goat and lobster along with him, as well as other things.

It's a feel-good, funny story and we've been enjoying it very much!

Katie Morag by Mairi Hedderwick

Ok so I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and blog about Katie Morag. Partly because we have been very over-excited recently seeing Katie Morag on cbeebies! Last week was a very long week because every day Rosie would ask if Katie Morag was going to be on cbeebies that day and I had to keep replying 'not until sunday.' But finally we got there and were rewarded with a double episode to start us off. It was nice to see that they used stories from the books as the basis for the episodes.

We have the mini treasures boxset which has eight Katie Morag stories in including: Katie Morag and the New Pier; Katie Morag and the Big Boy Cousins; Katie Morag Delivers the Mail; Katie Morag and the Riddles; Katie Morag and the Wedding; Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers; Katie Morag and the Tiresome Ted; Katie Morag and the Grand Concert. 

I think our favourite out of all of these is The Grand Concert. Rosie particularly likes the bit at the end where Katie Morag's dress is the same as her friend's and she's really upset. She doesn't understand why she would be upset and it fascinates her! The two uncles Sven and Sean are good characters and fun to read about in this one as well.

Rosie loves a wedding (I think it might be something to do with having been a flower four times before she was three!) and so she likes the wedding story a lot as well. It's very sweet with Grandma Mainland marrying Neilly Beag and Grandad Island turning up to put a smile on Grannie Island's face. 

One of my favourites is Katie Morag and the Big Boy Cousins because Katie gets led astray by her naughty cousins and then is the sorriest of them all and makes them all make amends to Grannie Island. It also features the phrase 'Gee Whillickers' which I can't stop saying since I first read it. It's such a perfect exclamation!

The cbeebies episodes so far have been Katie Morag Delivers the Mail and Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers. I like the fact they've chosen to dramatise rather than animate the stories, in fact it's interesting that Rosie's preferred shows at the moment feature real people rather than animation - Swashbuckle is her other favourite! 

So to conclude we love Katie Morag in storybook form and we are loving the TV show - at the moment!

The Fairytale Hairdresser and Sleeping Beauty by Abie Longstaff, illustrated by Lauren Beard

Hooray! Another Kitty Lacey story. We were watching the post for this one since we'd been promised a copy and Rosie kept asking me everyday when it was going to arrive. But finally it did and we've been enjoying it greatly.

It follows the same format as the other Fairytale Hairdresser books in that Kitty Lacey (the hairdresser) comes across a fairytale character in need of some help and hey presto with a wave of her scissors she fixes the problem - and then it usually ends with a wedding, like all good fairytales.

In Sleeping Beauty the fairy godmothers turn up at Kitty Lacey's shop in need of some cheering up because their beloved princess Rose has been put under a sleeping spell by the wicked fairy. Thankfully Kitty has a handy prince doing some gardening for her who turns out to be Rose's true love. Together they battle their way through the thicket of thorns and put the situation to rights.

There are lots of quirky references to different fairytales and nursery rhyme characters throughout the book and I particularly like how they deal with the wicked fairy (I won't spoil it!). Basically it's fun, funky and fabulous! There are two books before this one: The Fairytale Hairdresser and The Fairytale Hairdresser and Cinderella. What will be next?!

Ladybird Classics: The Secret Garden; The Railway Children; The Little Princess; A Tale of Two Cities

I was given six boxes of my childhood books from my parent's attic the other day. Along with most of the Chalet School series (all my hard-earned pocket money went on them!), the Sadler Wells series by Lorna Hill (I'm still a little bit in love with Sebastian!), the Little House on the Prairie series and Swallows and Amazons there was a box with all the Ladybird Classics in. I thought that Rosie might now be at an age where she would enjoy listening to the stories and I was right, we've been working our way through The Secret Garden, The Railway Children, The Little Princess and A Tale of Two Cities.

Unfortunately only a handful of them are still in print but at least some of them still are. You can find them here. Now I know that this series is slightly contentious in that some people think that these classics should never be abridged to this extent and that children should wait until they are older to read the proper versions but I see them with slightly rose-tinted glasses due to reading them all when I was a child and I wanted to share them with my daughter. I know that some of them are cut down to a basic plot but I think they still work and of course when Rosie is older she will probably read the full versions. This is just a taster!

Some of the phrasing and words used are a little too old for her still and of course some of the content is way over her head (French Revolution?!) but she is enjoying them on her own level and we've been reading a little bit of one each night before bed. I think my favourite is still The Little Princess. It's opened up some interesting discussions, we've talked about how Sara is trying to be like the ideal of a princess rather than actually being one, how people used to have tiger skin rugs with the head still attached - this is quite hard to explain! And lots of different things beside this. I guess this is our precursor to chapter books and I think it's a very good stepping stone. That's not to say we've leaving picture books behind. We're having a great Julia Donaldson run at the moment - I may blog about that next!

Unfortunately only Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty, Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Twist and Treasure Island are still in print but you can see from the picture above all the ones we will be reading!