So what’s this book all about?

Hanging upside down from the branch in a rainforest, a sloth slowly goes about his day. Not much happens; he wakes up, eats a leaf, falls asleep, observed by other jungle animals as they wander past. Eventually they brake their silence and reproach him – why is he so slow, so boring, so lazy? After much thought the sloth finally gives a gentle, clever and truthful answer to his detractors showing that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in being slow.

And why has it proved such a winner in the Playing by the book household?

And so, over five years since we first read Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth as a family, this weekend we decided to make our own sloth-inhabited rainforest. First we painted a box green, inside and out.

Then we made some trees and vines to go in our rainforest. We used toilet rolls, and cardboard rolls from inside kitchen paper and wrapping paper as tree trunks, to which we stuck leaves we’d cut out in various shapes, included “streamers” ie thin strips of paper we’d wrapped around a pencil to create vines.

Whilst the leaves on our trees dried we used plasticine (not sure if it’s called this elsewhere in the world – basically it’s a soft modelling clay which unlike playdoh doesn’t dry on exposure to air nor hardens by baking it (as fimo/sculpey would)) to create a selection of animals from Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth.

And finally the rainforest was assembled and various new stories created with the different animals as the girls played and recreated to their hearts’ content.

Amongst the creatures the girls made were the sloth, caiman, leaf cutter ants, python, jaguar, poison dart frog, porcupine, river turtle, macaw and toucan, although often using colours not actually found in the rainforest! Can you spot them all?

Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth: *** (3 stars)

Music we’ve enjoyed alongside Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth :

and for something a little livelier you could try

For more art / craft / play inspiration to go with this book you could try these:

And if you’ve never visited the online shop of The Eric Carle Museum of the Picture Book you’re in for a treat, but*be warned* you may end up spending too much on your card! Here’s their special selection dedicated to Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth.

Now to some very exciting news! This autumn, 680,000 copies of Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth will be given for free to all children starting reception class in England. To celebrate, Booktime are offering primary schools and libraries in England the chance to enter a prize draw to receive an exclusive, signed artist’s proof from the book. Anyone can nominate a primary school and a public library in England, and the nominations open today (6th September) and close on the 31st October.

Why don’t you go and nominate your kid’s school or library right now? You just need to visit the nomination page at Booktime’s website (where there are full terms and conditions), and fill in your school or library’s details.

As an adult I might describe Cave Baby as being about the sheer delight one can take in painting and drawing and how being creative is both stimulating and a source of comfort. Through my kids’ eyes I might say that Cave Baby tells the story of a stone age toddler who, bored one day, discovers a pot of paint and sets about decorating his family’s cave. The stone age parents are none too pleased (note to self: next time J scribbles on the wall, try not to act like a Neanderthal and instead recognise my child’s creativity ) and threaten the child with the possibility of mammoths throwing the young artist to the local big brown bear. Indeed a mammoth does then steal the toddler away in the middle of the night, and as they travel under the stars everywhere they turn the big brown bear seems to be lurking in the shadows. Eventually the toddler is deposited in what appears to be the bear’s cave… is he going to be eaten? Is he going to make it out of there alive?

With a clever twist in the tale everything of course ends well. The boy gets to paint to his heart’s content, and his exuberant cave paintings are much appreciated. He’s finally returned to his bed where his multicoloured dreams are full of the joy and delight he’s had whilst playing with his paint pot and brush.

Photo: Neanderthal Cave art Le Moustiar - SKI tripper

Julia Donaldson’s rhyming text trips off the tongue with the greatest of ease and seems to add an extra dimension as the tension rises. As a parent it’s great fun (and easy) to read, and for both my kids it’s clearly a delight to listen to – J in particular rocks along with the rhythm and very quickly learned to finish all the lines herself. Emily Gravett’s illustrations are sumptuous. Some spreads are richly dark and brooding, others full with fireworks of colour. Whilst Donaldson will no doubt forever be associated with Axel Scheffler (as illustrator of The Gruffalo), this new team of Donaldson and Gravett is tremendous, an outright winner. I hope it’s a collaboration we’ll see again soon.

With a cave already and waiting (inspired by Stone Age Boy), it didn’t take any persuading for the girls to get out their art materials and start creating their own cave paintings. First the girls used charcoal to draw pictures of animals and hunting.

The charcoal was pretty messy – I’d definitely recommend having a wet flannel on stand by

Next we tried some stencil painting, inspired by the cave art where you see an outline of (typically) a hand surrounded by fine spray.

Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands), Argentina

Originally these stencils were made by using a pigment filled tube and blowing through the tube to spray the pigment or by spitting the pigment directly from the mouth through pursed lips.

Not keen on encouraging spitting , we opted for a technique that would give a similar effect but without risk of flying saliva, and instead used a spatter screen (you could use a grater or a sieve instead), a toothbrush and a little paint. M draw images of possible cave art symbols, cut them out and then sprayed them with paint.

Finally, inspired by the artwork actually in Cave Baby we created “ink bursts”.

The girls used pipettes to drop ink onto card and then blew the ink all over the card using straws.

Here’s what our final gallery looked like before we hung it in the cave!

Cave Baby: *** (3 stars)

Here’s some of the music we enjoyed whilst painting:

Here’s some more inspiration if you fancy doing cave painting with your kids:

We’re now waiting for the release later this year of Werner Herzog’s latest documentary – all about the art work in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave, a site in southern France that contains the earliest known cave paintings, dating back at least 30,000 years. Titled Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it debuts later this month at the Toronto Film Festival. We’ll have to wait a little longer to visit Britain’s only known Ice Age Rock Art – at Creswell Crags, as kids under 5 are not allowed in the caves.

On a final note, it just so happened we picked up our copy of Cave Baby at a signing with Julia Donaldson – here she is with M and J!

Today I’m linking up with stART at A Mommy’s Adventures – I do hope you have the time to head on over there and see what other stories + art families have been up to!

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?