Photo: Laszlo-photo

With J’s current fish obsession we’re on the look out for books about fish at the moment. One Smart Fish by Chris Wormell was a chance find when we were visiting the Natural History Museum a few weeks back – it’s not a book I had previously heard of – but it’s now definitely one of J’s favourites so far this year.

One Smart Fish tells the story of a crucial evolutionary step – how many millions of years ago some fish left the sea and began life on land. It’s a big topic but through the use of stunning illustrations and perfectly pitched text, liberally sprinkled with humour, Wormell has written the ideal book for introducing the idea of evolution to young children.

Many pages are densely packed with a range of fish of all shapes, sizes, colours and texture, whilst the penultimate double page spread has a hugely detailed expanse of creatures surging out across the land showing the evolution from fish to – eventually – human beings. Like the earlier pictures of fish we can’t help pouring over the illustrations and playing “I spy” – just like we do when reading some other much enjoyed books of ours – Anno’s Journey or The History Puzzle.

One Smart Fish doesn’t attempt to deal with the science or evidence for evolution but it does introduce the concept of evolution exceptionally well. Both M and J find it funny yet brilliant that they are evolved from fish – this idea has really caught their imagination and M in particular has wanted to find out more. That Wormell’s book has so engaged my two kids and got them asking lots of questions is a testament to its brilliance.

Inspired by the range of beautiful and colourful fish in Wormell’s book we set about creating our own ocean full of fish. First I cut out lots of fish shapes from clear plastic containers I’ve been saving (strawberry punnets, for example). The girls used permanent markers (sharpies) to colour in and decorate the fish.

Next they had a lot of fun cleaning out an old fish tank that had been languishing amongst my pots at the back of the garden.

To make the fish appear to be swimming in the tank we attached two threads to each fish. One thread had a bead or a button attached at one end – the girls had an absolutely wonderful time investigating which of their beads and buttons would sink – an activity we have done again since as they enjoyed it so much. The other thread was attached to a small strip of bubble wrap to give the impression of bubbles coming out of the fishes mouths when they were in the water.

The fish tank was filled with water and then we added some sand – this made the water look a little dirty, but the idea was to make it seem more like the ocean than a sterile fish tank.

A few shells and some other marine life (ocotopi and sea horses) were added to complete our land beneath the waves.

We all had a great deal of fun creating this seascape – if you are inspired to do something similar, we’d love to hear about it

One Smart Fish: *** (3 stars)

Some fishy music to create by:

For more songs with an evolutionary theme you could take a look at Songs about Darwin and Evolution from Cells in Culture or Evolution Songs: Celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday from Gigwise.


And some more fish activities that might work well alongside this book:

Having read One Smart Fish – the text of which is simple enough for J, at 2, to enjoy and easily follow, I then read the more complex How Whales Walked Into the Sea by Faith McNulty, Ted Rand, and Ted Lewin with M. If you can get hold of it I would urge you do do so as I cannot imagine a better follow-up read to One Smart Fish – it deals with the evolutionary step taken by one branch of mammals that returned to the sea, eventually resulting in whales. I first came across this book thanks to a review over at In need of Chocolate, where you can find a great series of posts about books for kids on evolution and prehistory. If you wanted a book for adults that would go really well with One Smart Fish and How Whales Walked Into the Sea, At the water’s edge by Carl Zimmer comes highly recommended by my wonderful husband!

Now what about you? Do you have any favourite picture books about fish? Or about evolution?

Audiobooks play a hugely important role in our home – a day without one is certainly unusual. As well as providing the sheer pleasure of listening to a good story, they also allow us to introduce more Dutch into the home – an additional input alongside their (wonderful) Dad. All in all we love audiobooks and have so many that it made choosing my first one to review an enjoyable but interesting challenge.

Photo: Playful Librarian

After much deliberation I decided to review one of our very favourite audiobooks of all time – recordings of Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers and Katie Morag Delivers the Mail, both by Mairi Hedderwick (published 1986, Whigmaleene Story Cassettes, Collins Audio). This audiobook does everything I think an audiobook can and should do – it is a perfect example of what this format can bring to a great story, which is why I wanted to review it. But, and it’s a big “but”, it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere to buy, nor have I been able to find any copies in worldcat.org (a portal to many library catalogues around the world).

I don’t like to review stories which you then can’t get hold of yourself – but this is such a fantastic recording that I nevertheless had to go with it. It definitely deserves to go on your search list, just in case you strike lucky in a library or second hand book sale. So if you’ll forgive me for tempting you with the (possibly) unobtainable here’s why all of us at Playing by the book think this is an exceptional audiobook.

Photo: Professor P

The Katie Morag books by Mairi Hedderwick are all set on a remote (fictional) Scottish island called Struay. The stories are about family, friends, and life in a small, isolated community, and although we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every Katie Morag story we’ve ever read, it’s the illustrations which really steal the show. I cannot think of a more perfect rendition of life on a Scottish island (and we’ve been to quite a few, even honeymooning on one) – Mairi Hedderwick captures the wild beauty, the customs, the necessary adaptations to island life, the geography, the weather and even the clothing all so precisely you quickly become transported to Struay when you start looking at her illustrations.

With illustrations playing such an important role in the Katie Morag books I was curious to see how an audiobook could possibly do the printed books justice. And yet, and yet, this recording does transport you to Scottish island life, in a magical and unforgettable manner. Rather than simply copying the printed book, the audio book makes the most of the format by using a great deal of music and wonderful sound effects to create a special atmosphere that literally sings Scotland to you – there are several folksongs (including the The Mingulay Boat Song and Katie Beardie, as well as some toe tapping accordion music) and lots of birdsong (oystercatchers, curlews and gulls in particular) and the sound of wind and waves breaking on the shore. It’s an aural treat.

Photo: Jack Spellingbacon

The narrator of the stories (unnamed on my library copy) has a rich voice with a delicious Scottish accent – could it be otherwise? He sounds like he could be a fisherman, with a big beard and woolly jumper smelling of seaspray. The cassette recording opens with him setting the scene – a little bit of background information about Katie and the island of Struay, before he goes on to read the two stories, following the original text closely. The narrator’s opening works exceptionally well in introducing listeners to the location and preparing them for the stories ahead – he draws us in and settles us comfortably down so that we’re ready to really listen to and enjoy the two stories. And once the stories are over the narrator wraps up the recording talking to us about what else Katie might have gotten up to after the stories were finished – perhaps a ceilidh with some singing and dancing. It feels like we as listeners are being gently roused from our dreams and brought back to reality.

This is an audiobook of the highest order – the narrator has a gorgeous voice that matches the story to a T, the original stories have been respected, fantastic use has been made of music and sound effects, and with the narrative framing something extra has been added – something which you won’t find in the printed books. Whoever was responsible for creating this recording deserves a huge thank you and congratulations for being so creative yet faithful in their adaptation.

Photo: emaspounder

Whilst we listened most recently to this recording of Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers and Katie Morag Delivers the Mail we played with our indoor, rainyday sandpits (an idea I originally found at Beelieve). These are two baking trays with a few cupfuls of sand that I keep on a high shelf to be whipped down when I need something in a hurry for the girls to play with. Sometimes we add dinosaurs and stones to the sand, other times we have marbles, or shells. Today we made some special rollers to make shell prints in the sand.

Equipment

1. We rolled out some polymer clay to a thickness of about 5mm. We used enough polymer clay to ensure we could wrap it round the entire circumference of the metal tube (in our case this was 2 packs).

2. We wrapped the clay around the tube and then pressed shells into the clay.

3. We removed the shells and baked the clay as per the instructions on the packet.

4. We let the clay cool and then used our new “shell rolling pin” to make beautiful prints in our sand.

Whilst playing with sand, when we’ve not been listening to Katie Morag, we’ve been enjoying:

Other sand and island activities we want to try include:

I’m looking forward to checking out the other audiobook reviews over at Stacked – I hope you will too. I’ve started a page with some audiobook resources if you’re on the look out for some for your family. If you’ve any tips or recommendations it would be great to hear from you. What are your favourite audiobooks – ones you listened to as a child yourself, or ones that are currently popular in your home?

We wanted to do something to spruce up M’s room so we settled on a wall frieze with an underwater theme, using several of the suggestions from an old Kids Craft Weekly newsletter dedicated to life under the waves.

First up we made sparkly starfish – cardboard cutouts in the shape of said animal, slavered in glue and then dipped in small, shiny beads.

Next up were some octopus triplets, made from balloons, string, beads, straws and sellotape. We had to finesse the Kids Craft Weekly instructions a little; to stop the string from fraying as we threaded on the beads made from cut-up straws we had to wrap a small piece of sellotape around the end of the string. Also, sometimes it was a little difficult to get the string all the way through the straw beads so then we used a cocktail stick to push the string through (perhaps we should have made our beads shorter when cutting the straws).

After finally getting dressed and various other *chores* we made swishy jellyfish. We spread a thick layer of glue on the inside of some paper jelly bowls (how appropriate is that?!), and then stuck strips of shiny paper (to act as tentacles) into the glue.

After having dried for a couple of hours we turned the bowls over and applied yet more glue and then dipped the bowls into some shredded sparkly paper (sometime ago I found a jar of this ready-made stuff on sale at a local discount craft shop – it’s great because it’s sparkly like glitter, but much cheaper and easier to clean up!)

Next we created some silvery fish to add to the scene. I drew some fish shapes on sheets of silver foil and then the girls coloured them in with permanent markers.

We gave the fish scales by putting the silver foil on our biscuit cooling rack and rubbing it, to give it texture.

Although M is good with scissors, cutting foil can be quite difficult to do without tearing, so it was left to me to cut the fish shapes out.

Finally, a day or two after we’d begun, we prepared the backdrop for all these wonderful creatures – a long piece of backing paper, painted blue and green, with bits of crepe paper for seaweed and iridescent film for shafts of sunlight shining through the water.

Don’t you think it looks like a lovely place for a swim? Or even a bounce on your bed?! For a peek at another great underwater scene, take a look at this from Filth Wizardry.

Alongside all this crafting we’ve been reading Alison’s Lester Magic Beach, and Flotsam by David Wiesner.

Alison Lester’s Magic Beach is a wonderful place to escape to. On each double page spread she describes in gentle, easy-flowing rhyme an aspect of this special place of hers and presents us with an accompanying illustration which is full of delightful detail. Verses depicting different parts of her (real) beach, such as the rock pools or the high tide mark are interspersed with imaginings of what else might happen on the beach, such as digging up treasure or sailing to unexplored islands – exactly the sort of day dreams you could have whilst lying with your eyes closed on warm sands, listening to the birds and the breeze.

We have a mini, hardback version of this book (only a little larger than a playing card) and in and of itself it’s a lovely thing to hold and look at. The shiny, glittery waves forming a border around the main image on the front cover create a sweetie-shop effect of desire on the beholder – or at least on me and my girls. It’s size is perfect for slipping in a a handbag or rucksack so that it can be taken to the beach, where it deserves to be read and read again.

Flotsam, by David Wiesner, tells a beguiling story of a boy who spends his day exploring at the beach (you can tell he loves this hobby – he’s even brought his microscope in a ziploc bag to study the small bugs he finds in the sand). As he bends down on all fours to take a good look at a crab a large wave takes him by surprise and breaks over him. When the water drains away a peculiar looking box draped in seaweed has been left on the wet sands, and upon closer inspection it turns out to be an underwater camera.

What else can the boy do when he discovers a film inside the camera than rush to get it developed as quickly as he can. When he finally collects the photos he’s amazed by the window he’s given onto a strange, indeed astonishing world under the sea with clockwork fish, shell cities and alien life-forms guarded by truly other-worldly looking seahorses. Most intriguing of all, however, is the last photo which reveals a young girl on some distant beach holding a photo of another young person, holding up a photo of another young person… Using first his magnifying glass and then his microscope the beachcombing boy gradually realises that this camera has been travelling the currents for many years, and each time it has been washed ashore the lucky finder has taken a photo of him or herself holding the previous photo.

With the day coming to an end and the boy’s family gathering up its belongings the boy takes a self portrait of himself holding the photo of the previous discoverer of the camera and then he tosses it back into the sea. The book draws to close with the magic camera being carried across the oceans by squid, pelicans and porpoises through the strange realms seen in the earlier photographs, eventually washing up on another shore where we’re left gazing at a young girl, intrigued as she reaches out for this wonderful piece of flotsam.

This is a stunning book. The story is told entirely without words and the illustrations are superb, with clever use of varying scale in the images to create pace and tension in a story that left me wanting to linger on the last pages, to prevent me from reaching the end, just like when it’s time to leave the beach at the end of the day. Like Magic Beach the book production is also worth mention – this is another beautiful book to feel and hold, gorgeous enough to give as a special present (even to yourself!).

Magic Beach: Flotsam:

We’ve been singing Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside and listening to a compilation of seaside songs from the Early Learning Centre. The CD doesn’t appear to be on sale any more I’m afraid… We’ve also had on Billy Bragg’s The Beach is Free (which couldn’t be more different than the ELC CD!), found via Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child. Now that we’re actually down at the sea we’re gradually collecting what we need for a collage a la this posting at Kids Nature Spot, found via The Crafty Crow. We’re also toying with the idea of setting up a museum with the results of our beachcombing – in the Netherlands there are indeed several museums of this nature! For example the this one in Zandvoort an Zee, just west of Amsterdam or this one on the island of Texel.