Photo: Canon in 2D

Stone Age Boy, by one of our favourite author/illustrators – Satoshi Kitamura, has been out for a couple of years although it is new to us. As soon as I came across it, I knew we just had to read it together – it’s a powerful combination of a great history lesson (that could easily inspire you to try digging in the dirt) with Kitamura’s great storytelling and fabulous illustrations.

Told in the first person, this is the tale of a boy who whilst adventuring in the woods one day trips and falls down into a hole. With the help, perhaps, of a little bit of magic he recovers to find himself somewhere unfamiliar. Upon exploring he comes across a family, but this is no ordinary family, “They looked very strange, but they were kind to me and gave me some stew. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying“. The illustrations make it clear that the boy has found a family living in the stone age (probably Upper Palaeolithic) and soon we learn along with the boy about all the different aspects of life in this different time and culture. Detailed illustrations show us how fire and tools were made, how food was prepared and cooked. The boy delights in the excitement of a hunt and joins in with the celebrations that evening around the fire.

One day, after several weeks have passed, the young daughter of the family takes the boy to a very special and mysterious place – a cave full of paintings. Mesmerised by what he sees, the boy does not notice the approaching bear until it is too late. He ups and turns, trips and before he knows it the ground beneath him has given way and… he finds himself back in the 21st century.

“When I told my family what had happened, they didn’t believe me. They said I’d only been gone a few hours and I must have fallen asleep and dreamt it.” A twist in the tale on the very last page will let you decide for yourself whether or not the boy’s adventures really did happen, but whatever your believe in, this book is definitely a testament to the power of dreams – the boy’s experience, real or imagined, leads him to pursue a career in archaeology, a career, I suspect Kitamura might choose for himself if he could in another lifetime.

The opening of this wonderful story reminded me of not only of how the caves of Lascaux were discovered, but also of how Alice makes it into Wonderland, or Lucy into Narnia. Children may not get these cultural references, but they add to the enjoyment for me as an adult reading (and re-reading!) this book. Every page is packed full of information about life in the stone age. Whereas the last couple of books I’ve reviewed have technically been non-fiction books that could share a shelf with great fiction, this offering from Kitamura whilst catalogued a fiction picture book is so informative and detailed I’m sure kids (and adults) will learn more from it than from many a non fiction book on the same topic. The framework of a great story makes absorbing the facts go by almost unnoticed, but an index and a timeline add further opportunities for learning. The detailed text has meant this was a great book for reading with M, whilst the intricate and colourful illustrations were a huge hit with J too.

Having fallen in love with this book we set about creating our own stone age cave. Following the instructions at instructables.com we made a geodesic dome out of rolled up newspaper to form the framework of our cave.

We didn’t join up all the base triangles but rather left two unattached so that we could create an entrance to the cave. This meant the structure wasn’t as robust as it might otherwise have been, so I sured up the dome with a couple of sheets of cardboard from a large box.

We then covered the dome in wallpaper – we had a roll of horrible wood chip paper lying about in the back of a cupboard and it did the trick here perfectly as the texture looked a little rock-like! I covered two panels in the roof of the cave with transparent polythene (I use it in the garden so had some spare), to make sure the inside of the cave wasn’t too dark. You could use bubble wrap perhaps as an alternative.

Once the dome was covered we painted it grey (if you’re going to follow our lead and make your own cave, do put down an old sheet under the cave before you start making it so that it doesn’t need to be moved when it comes to painting it) and then we completed our stone age setting with some rocks and twigs for a fire and a sheepskin rug we happened to have.

I made the basic cave-girl costumes by folding over a length of fake fur (twice the length from shoulder to knee for each girl and as wide as the girls’ chests plus about 10cm, and with fur on the inside), cutting a diagonal across the fold leaving a strip about 10 cm for the shoulder strap, and then sewing up either side, leaving another 10cm gap on the shoulder side for an armhole. Clear as mud? Perhaps the diagram will help… Infact, with J’s costume I couldn’t sew it all the way up as I hadn’t cut the fabric wide enough – not all my projects work out perfectly! Anyway, I hope you get the idea. Even though they were far from perfect they did the trick – the girls insisted on wearing them even when we went to the supermarket!

Stone Age Boy: *** (3 stars)

Cave girls love to dance!

And here’s some of what we danced to:

We also watched some Flintstones on YouTube – I’m not really sure about the attitudes towards women and relationships in The Flintstones but the music is fun (as is having a pet sabre tooth tiger) and the stone age setting worked just perfectly with all the play we’d been getting up to.





Any self respecting stone age cave must have some art in it, and sure enough it wasn’t long before the walls of my girls’ cave was covered in stone age art – but more of that in future post where we’ll be reviewing the latest book by Julia Donaldson – Cave Baby… Stay tuned In the meantime, here are some other stone age and archaeological activities you could get up to with your kids that would work well alongside reading Stone Age Boy:

Do you know any other picture books set in the stone age? Or any great non-fiction books about early humankind?

We leant the sunflower stems against each other and then tied them together with string. We covered the basic frame with various large pieces of material from my stash including a couple of saris (I’m a huge fan of saris for building dens – they are easy for the kids to use as they’re light, drape well and are easy to clip on to things, plus being slightly see-through they let in light, and of course they are often beautiful! Apologies to those of you who think this sounds like I’m repeating myself ). We used butterfly clips to fix the material to the frame – butterfly clips are relatively easy for M to use by herself and and J for some reason finds them intrinsically desirable. I like them because they are *strong* – much better than normal washing pegs/clips – I definitely recommend having a bunch of them stashed for making dens.

I put a tarp down on the grass inside the tipi and then we made our afternoon abode a whole lot comfier with various quilts, blankets and beanbags. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, you can see why the girls insisted on having their supper in the tent!

Unfortunately our beautiful home-from-home was a fleeting beauty as we are already getting heavy dews overnight with the cold air and so everything had to be dismantled before bedtime, but it was definitely worth the effort!

Whilst a supply of outsized sunflower stems may not be locally available to you, you could do this with bamboo stems (the tall ones you can get from garden centres), or anything else you can find about 2m tall (?pieces of downpipe, real tent poles, narrow planks of wood…). A few bed sheets would suffice to cover the frame and if you don’t want to use your regular sheets, you could get some second-hand ones very cheaply from charity shops (then keep them safe as part of your den building stash!).

Of course some reading also got done in our cozy tipi, including a new book for us – A House Is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Betty Fraser. This book was first published 31 years ago and yet I only came across this book thanks to a comment left here on the blog (Thanks again Chrissy!) – and boy am I grateful for that comment because this book is absolutely wonderful, one that I think every family and school should have, and one which I’ve now recommended to our public library too as they didn’t have a copy. I don’t know how it is that I had never come across this book before – I can only suppose that it is because it is an American book, and because we’ve got a fairly vibrant kids’ lit scene here in the UK, books from elsewhere often don’t get the publicity they warrant.

But back to this gorgeous book which is wonderful to read, great to listen to, and utterly delightful to look at. (Yes, I know I’m gushing, but it really is that good!). Mary Ann Hoberman has written a bouncing poem with strong, effective rhymes about all the different types of homes and houses one can find. She starts with the names for different animal homes, for example in the opening lines:

A hill is a house for an ant, an ant.
A hive is a house for a bee.
A hole is a house for a mole or a mouse
And a house is a house for me!

As the book progresses Hoberman widens her interpretation of “home” to include all sorts of containers and their contents, for example:

Barrels are houses for pickles
And bottles are houses for jam.
A pot is a spot for potatoes.
A sandwich is home for some ham.

This imaginative redefining of “home” brings a great deal of (slightly zany) humour to the poem, which eventually ends a reminder that “Each creature that’s known has a house of its own / and the earth is a house for us all.”

This poem is a great vocabulary builder, with its inclusion of a wide variety of animal homes (eg. coop, sty, fold, hutch), but over and above this educational aspect, Hoberman’s text is simply great fun. Her creative take on “home” is really stimulating – it keys into a childlike/fairytale belief that apparently inanimate objects can have lives of their own, and before long M and I were laughing as we thought of other “homes” (“My mouth’s a home for some chocolate! or “My bed’s a home for my ted” “Your armpit’s a home for a tickle!”). The rhymes always work well and make the book a pleasure to read aloud, as well as appealing to young ears (I think the sing-song rhythm is why J, at just 1, enjoyed listening to this book with us).

So the text is definitely a winner… but then there are the illustrations… and they are so very lovely, detailed and beautifully coloured, creating a world that I simply want to step into and be part of. Each time the line “A house is a house for me” is repeated, Betty Fraser has drawn a different childhood den – the stuff of dreams – from tree houses and seaweed shelters at the beach, to under-the-table retreats, or a blanket thrown over the washing line. M has spent quite some time pouring over the images, enjoying finding tiny details (like the inclusion of a small owl and pussycat in a pea-green boat sailing on the ocean which is home to a whale) in the illustrations which fill each page to bursting. Betty Fraser’s style reminded me of some of the Little Golden Books – her use of colour in particular gives her images a vintage feel.

One final point I think is worth making is that with A House Is a House for Me you get quite a lot of book for your money – over 40 pages – which seems to be a lot for a £5 picture book these days.

A House Is a House for Me:

Whilst outside we didn’t listen to any music, but we have recently had on some goodies: Elvis Presley’s version of There’s no place like home, Home on the Range sung by Roy Rogers and Build My House by Woody Guthrie.

For some more den inspiration take a look at this great round up of outdoor dens from The Crafty Crow – check out the link to Ikat Bag in particular as she has a really inspiration list of links for table tents – I have drooled so much over these I think I shall now have to make one for a christmas or birthday present for me the girls…

What good memories have you got of making dens as a kid yourself, or with your own kids?