How to use this Page

Books for newly fluent independent readers often have great pace (to entice just one more page turn) and lovely characterization (encouraging growing kids to explore their own unfurling wings), but books for this age group with turns of phrases and fine, fine threads of words which make your heart sing are quite unusual.

And yet, Mango & Bambang: Tapir All at Sea written by Polly Faber (@Pollylwh) and illustrated by Clara Vulliamy (@ClaraVulliamy) has all of this, plus buckets more. Illustrated on every spread with immense charm, humour and warmth, and with an overall design to make small hands hug it close to their heart, this little hardback is everything you’d dream of, if trying to come up with something to foster an association of sheer joy and enchantment with books.

Mango Allsorts and her best friend Bambang (a friend who just happens to be a tapir) are looking for a new hobby, and would you believe it, but it turns out that after failures with ballet and baking, flamenco dancing hits the spot. 

Bambang, however, doesn’t get the chance to attend many lessons before an escapade involving climbing trees (there’s nothing a tapir can’t do when it comes to snaffling cake), a diamond engagement ring and a devious neighbour result in Bambang being put behind bars, not just once, but twice! Will the friends be able to use Bambang’s new dancing prowess and Mango’s clever problem-solving skills to save the day? Or could it be that their very partnership is put in peril as a result of Bambang’s newly discovered skill?

Joyous, open-hearted and very funny, these tales of Mango and Bambang are simply brilliant. A charismatic exploration of friendship, with a dash of quirkiness and oodles of wit, along with endearing illustrations (reminding me of Joyce Lankester Brisley and her Milly Molly Mandy books) that really draw out the beauty of the stories, Mango & Bambang: Tapir All at Sea is utterly delightful. My girls and I are really hoping that this second set of tales featuring Mango and Bambang won’t be the last.

If you spend any time at all hanging out with Clara Vulliamy you’ll very quickly learn that she is the Queen of Secret Haberdashery Supplies. I know of no other author or illustrator who has such an eye for beautiful ribbons, notions and buttons. With this in mind the girls and I wanted to create something Mango and Bambang-y which Clara herself (and, of course, Polly too) might enjoy making and thus we came up with the idea of designing flamenco costumes. This quickly developed into puppets of Mango, Bambang and friends all dress up in flamenco finery.

Generous as ever, Clara allowed the girls and me to adapt some of the images from Mango & Bambang: Tapir All at Sea to create paper dolls which we cut out and stuck on cardboard (you can download them here as a single pdf file).

Then we designed our flamenco costumes, colouring in the dolls and adding ribbons and trims, flowers and fans.

Finally our friends were ready to dance!

And dance we all did:

• Tamacun by Rodrigo y Gabriela (this is what you can hear in the background to the video above)
  
• Leyenda by Albeniz played by Andres Segovia
  
• Paco Peña and his show Flamenco sin Fronteras
  
• A just for fun… a bit of fancy footwork from Joaquín Cortés

Other activities which might work well alongside reading Mango & Bambang: Tapir All at Sea include:

• Making a sailor’s cap like Bambang wears. Here’s a video tutorial (just swap the blue paint for red!)
• Baking sticky ginger cake. My very favourite sticky ginger cake comes from Argos Bakery in Stromness, but as that’s a bit far for many of us to travel, here’s a recipe from Delia, and another from Nigella
• Creating your own Museum of the Unusual. Of course, I wouldn’t encourage you to be as mean as Dr Cynthia Prickly-Posset, but starting a collection of things you find weird and wonderful (without resorting to stealing them from your neighbours!) is a fun idea. Maybe your museum will be full of strange shaped stones, or bizarre things you’ve found down the back of the sofa… If you’re looking for some display ideas for your museum, you might find inspiration in past museums we’ve created here, here and here

Delivered by FeedBurner

Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

Summer holidays are nearly upon us here in the UK and so I’ve compiled a set of places to visit with the family all of which have a children’s literature link.

Last week I treated myself to an morning exploring the Island of Berk and reacquainting myself with just how one goes about training a dragon by visiting Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s A Viking’s Guide to Deadly Dragons with Cressida Cowell

The exhibition originated at the marvellous Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books and is now slowly touring the UK (in 2015 it will be in the National Museums, Northern Ireland and The Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, whilst in 2016 it will visit Norwich Castle Museum and Tullie House, Carlisle).

Based around Cressida Cowell’s How to Train your Dragon series, the exhibition is packed with original illustrations, both draft drawings and finished artwork, notebooks and video interviews, audio clips and [you have been warned!] …dragons.

There’s a viking long boat you can climb in and sail away on, there’s a camp fire for telling stories around, there’s dressing up and there are books you can just sit and enjoy reading.

The dragons are very keen to be played with, though some are scarier than others!

I think kids will love seeing some of Cressida’s school work – a descriptive piece she wrote with comments from her teacher on how to improve it!

I love showing kids how even very successful authors “uplevel” (to use my girls’ schools’ favourite bit of literacy jargon) their work; it’s completely normal to revise, edit and improve. That’s why this little note caught my eye:

I was delighted to see that some dragons love reading!

Something about these little girl vikings really caught my eye:

The exhibition has a great mix of open space – allowing kids to rush around playing with the dragons and climbing aboard the long boat – and fascinating artwork and notes from the author that are worth spending time really looking at closely. If you don’t know the books, you’ll get a great flavour of them and the kids will still be able to enjoy the exhibition because there are plenty of things to do, including lots of buttons to press. If you DO know the books, it is really exciting to see the art work and something of the development of Cowell’s ideas. It’s also pretty fun to cuddle the dragons!

Snuck in between information on Dragonese and the Hooligan Initiation Programme there’s also some factual background to the vikings which was nice to see. There’s a special section devoted to the How to Train Your Dragon films and my plan is to take the girls to the exhibition one morning during the summer holidays and then to the film in the afternoon Would you like to join us?

The exhibition is FREE and runs till August 30th. It’s well set up for people with hearing impairment, with all the videos either signed or subtitled. The cafe in the museum is one of the best museum cafes I know and the rest of the museum is really well geared up for families, with lots of hands-on activities in every space.

Full details: http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/events/vikings-dragons/

Are there any children’s book themed exhibitions on near you in your part of the world? Please do let me know – even if I can’t visit them, I’d love to know about them!

In this day and age where there are fewer and fewer independent bookshops, some of the most exciting bricks-and-mortar places for discovering new children’s books are the shops in museums and art galleries.

Whilst they may not carry a huge range of stock, they often have quirky, unusual books which would never make it to the surface on the shelves in a highstreet chain bookshop. Two recent publications by Princeton Architectural Press are prime examples of the sort of books I mean: Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, both by Patricia Geis, are part of a stylish, new and playful Meet the Artist! series which I really like.

Alexander Calder contains a simple biography of the artist’s life and then focuses on several of Calder’s recurrent or particularly important themes or pieces. We learn about his love of making toys, his circus, wire sculptures, mobiles/stabiles and what my kids instantly recognised as what they call “junk modelling”, but which is here referred to as sculpture out of “found objects”. So far, so fairly normal for a non-fiction book about an artist.

But this book is not like your average artist biography because it is full of surprises. There is pop-up bunting, a length of metal chain to play with, press out card toy reproductions, flaps, string and cut-outs. This book is about really engaging with Calder’s art, not just looking at it, but doing it, and viewing it from all angles.

To describe this as a “novelty” book would be unfair, as that label often carries the connotations of cheap gimmickry. Here the physicality of the book engages the reader in a way that I think gives valuable insight into the artist: this book is playful and unconventional, just as Calder was.

The Pablo Picasso volume is equally design conscious, with short pieces of text and white expanses left around the crisp reproductions of Picasso’s art so that they really stand out. The pop-ups are not quite as successful in this volume; sculpture, inherently 3-D, is simply more exciting when it pops up off the page than a reproduction of a flat painting, even with clever use of stands and frames.

Whilst these books might not be favoured in public libraries, with all their moving and loose parts being unlikely to stand up to masses of (quite rightly) active reading, I love how they are a stepping stone to encouraging self-expression (“If a famous artist can sculpt with clothes pegs, then I can try that too!”) and through that, self confidence. Non-Fiction book aren’t just about learning facts!

Alexander Calder‘s Circus is one of his most famous pieces of art and so my girls decided to create their own version. First up M made some bunting out of paint chips. She folded them in half, and then cut out a triangle that she folded over a length of string and held in place with a glue dot.

For our circus artists we downloaded, printed and coloured this great circus set from Made by Joel and made further unusual attractions out of corks and jewellery wire (in the spirit of Calder’s wire sculptures and found objects sculptures).

Watch out for our terrifying circus lions!

Whilst making our circus and then playing with it we listened to:

Other activities you might be inspired to get up to having read the Alexander Calder Meet the Artist! book include:

A third book in the Meet the Artist! series is planned for the Autumn of 2014: Henri Matisse will be the subject of the new volume and I’m certainly looking forward to it.

Disclosure: I received free review copies of both Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso from the publishers.

Original artwork from The Tiger Who Came to Tea and other books by Judith Kerr are on display at this retrospective we were lucky enough to visit at the start of the holidays.

The first section of the exhibition features several of Judith Kerr’s early childhood drawings, which Kerr’s mother carefully brought with the family on their flight from Germany in the 1930s. It’s amazing that they’ve survived.

A picture by Kerr, aged 9, titled Fairground at Harvest Festival

This part of exhibition in fact explores Kerr’s childhood and her experiences of having to escape Germany as Hitler came to power. We read about how it felt for Kerr to be a refugee in Switzerland, then France before finally settling in London in 1936.

Our favourite corner in the exhibition space was that inhabited by the life-size tiger in Sophie’s kitchen.

The kids adored this role play area. My only slight sadness was there were no empty beer bottles!

In the next part of the exhibtion we had lots of fun curling up and reading inside Mog’s cosy basket.

Something new I learned from the exhibition is that Kerr has designed wallpaper and fabrics.

Textile design by Judith Kerr, 1950s

Wallpaper designed by Kerr

We had a great day quite literally playing by the book: I can highly recommend this exhibition if you’re anywhere near the West Midlands. It runs till 29 September and is free. You can find full details 5 Comments on A Judith Kerr Retrospective at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, last added: 8/6/2012