Invisible is a wordless book about an afternoon spent in a seaside town full of interesting characters. Not only will you smile at the Kamm’s observations about the rich panoply of life, from nuns to peeing dogs, you’ll enjoy the tricks the pictures play on your eye; on each spread something appears invisible because it blends in with the background colour. Only the negative shape left behind gives a clue as to what has become invisible, and so it becomes a game to see if you can work out what that is before you turn the page.

The illusions are clever and witty, and the bright, bold, saturated colours give this book a fresh feel. The game is fun even (or perhaps especially) once you know what’s going on – there’s something delightful about being tricked, about falling for the illusion (in this way it reminded me a little of Tullet’s much acclaimed Press Here).

Image copyright: Katja Kamm

This spunky book might not appeal to everyone. There’s nudity (well, invisible nudity…), buxom punks, as well as an anatomically correct male dog doing what dogs like best to do on the pavement, and I do feel uncomfortable about the scene where the nuns are frightened by something in the (black) night – it turns out to be a black man. But it’s nevertheless a fun, original read that I’d definitely recommend to anyone interested in illustration or design: I thought Invisible was a breath of fresh air and am delighted to have discovered it thanks to Gathering Books’ Award Winning Book Challenge.

Of course the girls (and I) wanted to play at being invisible after reading this super book. Making an entire child (or mum) invisible is a little tricky, but I did show the girls how they could make a stamp or a sticker (appear to be) invisible.

I sent the girls out of the room whilst I got everything ready: I put two lidded jam jars on the worksurface. One was filled with water, and underneath it I placed a stamp.

I then invited the girls in and asked them to take a look at the jars. Did either of the jars have something underneath them?, I asked… No, came the rather unexcited reply.

I then took the lids off the jars and asked the girls to look from the top. Now could they see anything underneath either of the jars?

Ah, yes! A stamp (and no ordinary stamp at that!). The girls looked again from the side and once again the stamp seemed invisible, yet when they looked from the top, Matilda was smiling back at them.

Having replaced the lids, I picked up the jars and the girls got to investigate what difference the water made in the jars. First the empty jar was placed on the stamp, then the jar filled with water. With the empty jar on top, the stamp was clearly visible from the side…

…but with the water-filled jar on top, the stamp suddenly became invisible! Ta-da!

So very simple, but so very effective

And what’s going on here? Very simply put, when light passes from water to air it gets bent, making the object appear to be somewhere else. In this case, the water makes the stamp appear higher up, nearer the surface of the water. Looking from the side, the refracted image can’t be seen, but looking from above it can.

Whilst making stamps disappear, we listened to:

(I also considered Invisible Touch by Genesis, Invisible by Alison Moyet, but they didn’t make the cut )

Other creative ideas that work well with Invisible include:

Now at the top of this post I talked about two personal goals for Playing by the book this year. To help me achieve my second goal, I’ve signed up for Pinterest. You can find me here on Pinterest, where I’ll be gathering my favourite creative ideas from around the web, especially creative ideas to do with books. I’ve even created a board with more invisibility ideas if you’re looking for yet more fun things to do alongside Katje Kamm’s Invisible.

So when I saw that Ellie’s second book, Daisy plays Hide-and-Seek came out at the start of May I was very keen to take a look…

Jake and his bovine friend, Daisy, play hide and seek. You’d think finding a large cow wouldn’t be that difficult, but Daisy is no ordinary cow. In fact she’s somewhat of a chameleon, able to change her hide (no pun intended!) to blend in with the background. Jake looks in low places, high places, wet places and dry places but, despite his best efforts, he cannot find his friend.

Finally Jake can think of only one more place Daisy might be – in the field full of cows. But is she there?

This gorgeous, gentle book about the delights – and frustrations – of playing hide and seek is perfect for a quiet, calm storytime. Ellie’s illustrations are highly textured, full of soft colour and kids and adults alike will love looking for Daisy on each page. If your children enjoyed the game of finding Halibut Jackson, I’m sure they’ll love this book!

Another thing I like about this book is that it can be enjoyed by a wide age range of kids. The simple text with plenty of repetition makes it great for the preschool crowd, whilst I think the book could be used well if you’re teaching prepositions, or talking about the senses with slightly older kids. The number of different processes used in creating the beautiful illustrations might inspire even older children to mix and match different techniques in their own artistic creations.

All in all, whilst we all love a book that allows us to roar and yell, it’s great to have such a beautiful, sunny and peaceful book (with a boy protagonist, to boot) in our story collection.

Inspired by Daisy’s ability to camouflage herself M and I made our own book of hidden animals. To start with we created a concertina book by sellotaping thin card at opposite ends.

We then chose matching pieces of patterned paper (we happened to use origami paper, but you could use wrapping paper, or anything you like as long as it has a regular pattern on it), and keeping one piece whole, we cut out animal shapes from the matching piece, and then glued them on to card.

I’m not great at drawing animals so we googled “animal silhouettes” and “animal stencils” to find patterns to use. When the glue was dry we cut out our animals, and glued the remaining whole pieces of paper into our book on alternate pages. Using paper fasteners we then attached our animals into the books, matching the patterns.

The idea of using paper fasteners, and having the animals stuck on card was that then the animals can be rotated, making it easier to see their shape.

Having created visually hidden animals, we then created some animals hidden in letters – I explained the concept of anagrams to M and asked her to write her own anagrams for each hidden animal opposite the matching visually hidden animal.

She decorated the book with doodles and then we presented it to Dad and J with a great deal of pride and not a small amount of laughter – M thought the anagrams were hilarious! I was taken aback by how funny she thought the idea was – definitely a winning little language game that we’ll play again!

Special thanks go to my blog reader Fatima in Spain who sent me a beautiful handmade Halibut Jackson card which inspired our hidden animals today!

Whilst we made our book we listened to:

Other activities which could work well alongside reading Daisy plays Hide-and-Seek include:

You can read a couple of reviews of Ellie’s first book, Birdsong here (from Library Mice) and here (from The Book Chook). Susan (The Book Chook) has also review Daisy plays Hide-and-Seek – just two day ago! – here.

You can find out more about Ellie and how she works next week, when I’ll be interviewing her! Ellie is also appearing at the Just So Festival in August, where she’ll be reading Daisy and the Hide-and-Seek Cow, with some Just So style Hide and Seek games thrown in. You can find out more about the weekend-long festival of creativity aimed at children, young people and their families that is the Just So Festival here.

In the meantime, have you got a favourite cow book? Or Hide-and-Seek book?

Disclosure: Daisy play Hide-and-Seek was provided to me gratis by the publisher. This review, however, reflects my own and honest opinion.

Photo: Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden

One dark night a kindly bear thinks on his feet to save the life of six white mice hunted by an owl, a fox and a snake. As the mice curl themselves up into tight balls, Scruffy Bear convinces the predators that what he has at his feet are not mice, but rather snowballs, eggs or apples. At the last moment the hunters realise they’ve been tricked but by then Scruffy Bear and his new friends have made off and are safe and sound thanks to his quick thinking.

I’m sure some reviews will say that this book celebrates ingenuity, quick wittedness and courage, all characteristics we might wish to encourage in our kids as we read to them. But I’m afraid that this is not a book that has shot into my early-favourites-for-2011 list.

Scruffy Bear’s alternative descriptions of what the owl, fox and snake find on the ground just don’t work for me. I suppose they are meant to be clever but they lacked the kernel of believability that I think is necessary to carry the story forward.

Maybe this is a case of where an adult reaction to a book is very different to that which it might receive from a child. Indeed, M and J have both enjoyed this book a great deal and find Scruffy Bear’s white lies very funny indeed, but reading the book out loud I didn’t enjoy it to the same degree. In an ideal picture book I’m looking for something that my kids and I enjoy equally (even if for different reasons) and for this reason Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice didn’t thrill me the way One Smart Fish did.

Maybe I’m missing the point entirely and Scruffy Bear’s alternative explanation for the six furry balls at his feet are meant to be totally outrageous and unbelievable in order that we can enjoy laughing all the more at fooling the owl, fox and snake. But if the enemy turns out to be just plain stupid, rather than the protagonist actually clever, the story falls a little flat for me.

The illustrations are perfectly nice and Wormell can definitely draw beautiful animals but like the story, whilst the illustrations are fine and appeal to the children I didn’t fall in love with them or feel that thrill of excitement I did with the colours and details in Wormell’s last book.

Photo: discoodoni

Finally I think it would be amiss if I didn’t comment on the story’s pivotal plot device – the use of white lies. Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice could be used with kids M’s age and older to start an interesting discussion about whether lying can be ok in some circumstances. Whilst I generally don’t like stories which seem to have been written didactically about “right” and “wrong”, I nevertheless found it slightly odd that this picture book celebrates outrageous, if ultimately beneficial fibbing with no further comment on it.

So it’s with mixed feelings that I’ve been reading this book to my girls. From their laughter it’s clear they enjoy it and we have been able to talk about honesty and deception and when the former might not be the best policy and the latter something that is acceptable. All of this means that the book is definitely worth sharing with your kids, even if it didn’t quite meet my high hopes. It’s a good book, just not a great book.

The girls wanted to play out the story with their soft toys (and that surely says something about the book hitting the spot with at least these two kids) so we made a couple of white pom-poms to act as the curled up white mice.

We used these instructions from Kid Craft Central. Making the pom poms took a few days (in lots of short bursts) and quite a lot of patience. M was able to do everything herself, and J was able to help me by pulling the threads through the central hole.

Scruffy Bear’s deception starts to unravel after one of the mice fails to tuck in his tail – although Scruffy Bear comes up with another quick thinking response to explain away the pink “worm”, it’s at this point the penny starts to drop in the mind of the predators. M and J wanted their mice to have untucked tails so we added a pink pipecleaner (chenille stem) after having passed a length of wool between the two pieces of cardboard, tying together all the strands of wool.

Having acted out the story of Scruffy Bear the girls soon discovered it was a lot of fun to have an inside snowball fight (all our snow outside has melted now), and the pompoms worked brilliantly for this, being heavy enough to throw far and fast, but soft enough not to hurt anyone or do any damage.

Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice: ** (2 out of 3 stars)

Whilst preparing our pompom mice cum snowballs we listened to:

Other activities which you could pair with Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice include:

Disclosure: I received my copy of Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice gratis from the publisher. This review, however, reflects my own and honest opinion.