Photo: suneki

We are not unkeen on penguins here (heck, there’s even a penguin running our computer), so when Dani of the Literary Gift Company left a comment for me suggesting we might enjoy 365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet I couldn’t resist finding out more.

When the book arrived through the post, it was as if it were my birthday – the book is unusually large (almost A3 sized), beautifully printed on heavy glossy paper, and (hooray!) it doesn’t have a dust jacket (One of my pet peeves when it comes to kids’ books is the issue of dust jackets – in our house books are to be read, and played with, and taken to bed, and even used sometimes as building material. They are not going to sit quietly on a shelf collecting dust from which they need to be protected.)

All this added up to the book feeling like a solid present, a real gift, and that was before I had even opened it and read it with the family. And yet things did get even better when we sat down with this irreverent but informative quirky story of 365 Penguins…

New Year’s Day sees the arrival, at a family home, of an anonymous parcel containing a single penguin. Each day (for what turns out to be a whole year) another parcel arrives, and with each parcel new problems accrue. At first the problems are not so serious (what names should the family give the penguins?), but as the number of penguins rises, the family’s problems multiply. There are storage issues, there is the cost of feeding the animals and the noise, to say nothing of the smell. There are penguins every where!

When the year of penguin parcels is up, it transpires that they have been sent to the family in a (rather misguided) attempt to save them from dying out through loss of habitat – the family’s Uncle is an ecologist and…

As you know, the planet is heating up. The ice caps are melting. Year after year, these lovely birds of the South Pole see their territory get smaller and smaller. To increase their chances of survival, I decided to introduce them to the North Pole. But unfortunately, you can’t export endangered species. So I found an expensive but secret way: sending one penguin a day to your family during one year.

Uncle Victor is then seen leaving with all but one of the penguins, much to the family’s relief. It would seem that the family’s problems are all over …but then the next day the postman arrives at the family’s front door with a much larger parcel…

This absurd, over-the-top story made all of us giggle and laugh. It also made us stop and think – not only is the book full of opportunities to learn or practise all sorts of mathematical concepts (the number of days in a week/month/year, addition, multiplication, 3 dimensional shapes to name but a few), it also led to a discussion about animal habitats and climate change. Serious issues along side a serious dose of silliness and fun – what a great combination!

As well as having a meaty story to chew over, this book is delicious because of the amazingly zingy illustrations. The limited palette (black, white, grey, orange and brown), along with the rather stylized illustrations gives this book a fresh yet retro feel – it reminded me of some Bernice Myers books, such as Gravity All Around. The size of the book makes it difficult to read with only one free hand, or in bed, but actually the larger than life format of this book matches its contents perfectly.

One of the big problems the family faces when inundated with all these penguins is how to store them. They try stacking them, then they file them away in boxes of a dozen, then they build a cube out of them – and these storage solutions provided us with a great opportunity to craft and play.

First we made quite a lot of penguins (not quite 365, but still rather a lot) out of polystyrene cups. We painted them (we had to use acrylic paint as our regular poster paint wouldn’t stick to the cups), stuck on googly eyes and orange beaks. As we’re still having lots of grey days here, we opted for colourful, if atypical looking, penguins.

Once our penguins were ready to march we tried our hand at storing them every which way.

M and I had a lot of fun adding, subtracting and counting our penguins, plus lots of practice at concentrated placing of the penguins to build up our stacks.

365 Penguins: *** (3 stars)

We’ve been listening to:

Here’s some more penguin art and play we like:

For more kids’ literature with a maths flavour, take a look at this selection from Open Wide, Look Inside.

At the risk of boosting Amazon’s sales yet further, what books are any of you reading at the moment with your kids which you think we would enjoy here at Playing by the book?

So working through the shelves J pulled down Penguin by Polly Dunbar, who we’d come across previously when we read (and enjoyed) Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy. Penguin won the Booktrust Early Years Awards in pre-school category and the silver award in the Nestle Children’s Book Prize for children under five years old in the year it was first published (2007) so all the signs pointed towards us taking this book home and having fun reading it. And that is exactly what we did.

Ben ripped open his present.
Inside was a penguin.
“Hello, Penguin!” said Ben.

“What shall we play?” said Ben.
Penguin said nothing.

Ben tries everything to get his lovely new stuffed toy friend to talk to him – he tickles his penguin, he sings a silly song, he stands on his head. But all to no avail. Ben becomes a little frustrated and pokes fun at Penguin but this also fails to provoke a response. More drastic action is required.

When even firing penguin into outer space doesn’t work, Ben gives up and tries to feed his present to a passing lion. However, the lion doesn’t play ball; he refuses to eat the penguin. Poor Ben is exasperated and finally yells furiously at the penguin and then… something truly terrible happens!

Quite what occurs is best left to enjoy when you read this book, but suffice it to say that this calamitous event finally spurs the penguin into action, catastrophe is averted, and in his own way, Penguin finally does what Ben has wanted all along and all’s well that ends well.

This story, with its twist initially reminiscent of something out of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales, is simply and beautifully told by Polly Dunbar. What I love is that it perfectly captures that childhood belief that your soft toys are “real”, balancing rational fact (as adults we know that these are, after all, inanimate objects) with youthful hope and optimism, the latter being richly rewarded. The illustrations are uncluttered and simple (like the text); the interaction between the characters becomes the focus with virtually no background or visual setting to give away their location. The large expanses of white page surrounding the characters instead ensure the sparse use of colour is particularly effective. So all in all, in this household we all agree that Penguin is most definitely a worthy award winner, and a must-read for families with young children.

Inspired by the eponymous penguin, we set to making our own penguin colony. Here’s how we did it:

1. We gathered:

2. We mixed up some black paint with PVA glue and then used the potato to make black blobs all over the sheet of card.

3. Before the black glue/paint mix dried we stuck the white roundish paper on to the black potato prints to create the penguins’ tummies.

4. Again, before the glue had time to dry we added eyes to each of the penguins….

5. …. and then beaks

6. To complete the penguins we draw some feet and flippers (M insisted on being anatomically incorrect – “MY penguins have *long* legs”).

We used pencils rather than pens because when the pencil tips got a bit of paint/glue on them it was easier to wipe off than if we had used felt tips.

7. The penguin landscape was covered in snowy cotton wool, stuck down with some more PVA glue.

Admittedly I prepared the tummies and beaks in advance, but even so, this was still a quick and easy craft with instant results. Originally I had wanted to use potatoes to print all parts of the penguins, but I realised that the girls would get very bored waiting for the paint to dry before printing the next part of the penguin (which would have been necessary for the paint not to mix and turn everything black). I think individual penguins could work well as christmas cards, especially if you added a couple of silver stars or a bit of glitter. Alternatively you could use brown paint and red tummies and make robins.

Penguin: (We bought our own copy this week for £1.99 from The Works)

Whilst making the penguins we’ve been listening to Happy Feet’s soundtrack and the totally raucous but and fun Antarctica by The Dreadnoughts. Other penguin inspired activities we’ve noted for future crafty sessions include:

Finally, we’d love to hear what books, songs and crafts about penguins you and your kids love…so over to you now!