Designed for ages 8-11 years or indeed aspiring writers of all any age looking for inspiration and guidance for inspiring adjectives, testing your word choices, faces and features, writing about clothes, under the sea, the busy city, the tropical rainforest or putting yourself into the story. And all about writing dialogue and words for feelings and personality. If you want to add some extra magic to your stories, get help with creating characters, setting scenes and opening a wonderful world of words, here is plenty of space to build your own word bank. Big spiral bound hardback with beautiful fun children's designs and borders and robots, animals and characters and plenty of lined space and suggested words decorating every page.

Four salty seadog pirates, one with a spade, one with a hooked hand, one with a pegleg and one looking out to sea and all wearing big boots with turnups are four of the eight puppet characters in the box set. The other four are pirate flags, a sailing ship and an eagle. Each of the puppets are on sticks and the accompanying sheet of paper gives a few tips on how to start telling stories with your puppets whether they are in the middle of the woods, out at sea, their motive to find hidden treasure and what unexpected occurrence could change their plans. Plus how you will end your story whether they remain friends or are now deadly enemies! The brief history of shadow puppets explains that they were used as long ago as 2,000 years in China and it is believed that French missionaries brought the artform from China to Europe in the 1760s. India and many southeast Asian countries still have their own traditions of shadow puppetry today, often accompanied by dramatic music to enhance the story. For ages 3+, let your imagination go wild.
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Lift the lid of the treasure chest to discover tiny colourful, beautifully decorated real wooden animal figures in two dimensions and of course in pairs - one pink one green tortoise, a pair of tall, smiling yellow spotted giraffes, purple hippos dancing, blue elephants, golden male and female lions, two bunnies, two pigs, two owls, two highly decorated bulls and of course Noah himself. The teeny weeny booklet tells the story of Noah and his Ark full of animals. A long time ago, God looked down from Heaven to Earth. He saw that people are not being nice to one another and were very bad. But one man was good. His name was Noah. He loved God very much. The treasure chest opens out into a tryptic perfect backdrop showing the Ark to play with the wooden figurines. Ages four and up.

An ingenious doodle, fold and colouring in book from the great art publishers Thames & Hudson, use the slit in the front cover and draw through the holes, turn pages to find the surprises, turn the book around and upside down and on its side and follow the arrows and fold backwards and forwards. Fill your book with funny faces and add hats, glasses, big ears, and join Marcia having a cup of tea with Martians on a spaceship or fold the pages to make Mr Bee's nose grow. Draw what smells so good or other characters who live in the tree besides the owl and the squirrel. Fill in the speech bubble with words that Nathan and Natalie are nattering about and fill in the characteristics of identical twins Sam and Charlie and decide if they are boys or girls. We meet Princess Portia and her pooch and can draw in her jewellery and open the huge double double page spread to make noises and use your loudest colours as we tweet and woof and miaow with the animal characters. Best of all are the section of pages cut into three strips where you can mix and match faces and ideas and shapes and colours and hairstyles. 64 large pages, colour, ages three and up.

A parody of the popular seafaring narrative of his time, Jonathan Swift's masterpiece was written 'to vex the world rather than divert it.' Lemuel Gulliver, English surgeon turned ship captain, embarks on four fantastic voyages, each a clash with strange beings and cultures, from the eccentric to the odious. Island by island he meets the savage but tiny Lilliputians, the hideous Yahoos, a stable of talking horses, a race of decrepit immortals, and the ghosts of Julius Caesar and Homer. This very much abridged introduction is for little tots ages 5-8, and much of the enjoyment is from the full page beautiful colour artwork which is especially attractive even to adult collectors of children's books. Slim softback, 48pp.

Jack and the Beanstalk, The Magic Bird, The One-Inch Prince, The Billy Goats Gruff, The Brave Little Tailor, Hop-On-My-Thumb, Theseus and the Minotaur, The Giant Princess, The Princess and the Ogre, and The Valley of Diamonds retold by Sam Baer and others for preschoolers. Bursting with funny and fantastic characters from all around the world including stomping giants, angry ogres, a very greedy troll and a snorting, snarling minotaur lurking in a labyrinth. Boldly coloured appealing new illustrations decorate every page with text wrapped around in fairly large print on bright white quality heavyweight paper in an impressive and collectable hardback of 144 pages with satin pagemarker. Ages 5-8.

A masterpiece of paper engineering and for all collectors of pop-up books, here are 20 flaps to lift and giant pop-ups, the first of which is a map of Ancient Egypt in a booklet entitled Africa on the inside front cover. Lift the flap to discover a tomb of treasure where pharaohs were buried in beautifully decorated tombs surrounded by possessions that they might need in the Afterlife. The next double page spread takes us right inside a big pop-up pyramid complete with flap to lift to see the chambers concealed within and mystery spaces where today mini robots have explored and found miniature doors at the ends. We learn that the Sphinx was carved from a single block of stone and is 73m long, about the length of five buses. There is a feature on making a mummy which took about 70 days and each step is described and illustrated and the role of gods and priests. Pull up more flaps as you turn each page, the next one is a spectacular Tutankhamun's Death Mask with an explanation that the Ancient Egyptians believed that the spirits of the dead return to their bodies each night and a face mask gave the spirits a way to recognise their own remains. There is the mummy's journey on the funeral and pull and lift more flaps from the pop-up to find hidden treasure, great and small. With a useful glossary, this is designed for Egyptologists aged 7-70. 16 huge pages, popping out, 24.5 x 32.7cm.
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The book quite literally opens with a triple gatefold, a beautiful artwork with short text telling an ancient tale where underneath a river lives a beautiful goddess using ancient stylised Chinese depictions, the noble train of horses and porters approached the mountain of Jing. In pale greens for lush grass, the mermaid figure has a green fish-scale back, an alluring goddess. "She's a light as a swallow in flight and as supple as a flying dragon. Her face is even more radiant than the chrysanthemums that bloom in autumn..." Another five page gatefold then unfurls in an exquisite Chinese artwork foldout showing the beautiful goddess decorated with fine jade and gold, she skips as she walks here and there picking flowers and magically plucks out reishi mushrooms. We are told that these were used for medicinal purposes throughout China. There are stylised carp fish with beautifully decorated scales, waterlilies peeping up with eyes at the surface, tendrils of flowers and swirling water. "My heart was filled with love, but at the same time I was afraid of being tricked." This ancient Chinese poem was created by Caoz Zhi in the period 220-280CE. He is returning from the capital to his own land when he stops at the Luo River for a rest where he instantly falls in love with the goddess. He sees a nymph of peerless beauty and is swept away by her ethereal beauty. We follow the dreamlike journey and even more four-page gatefold pullout pages in a truly entrancing tale. There are more gatefolds with six dragons in a procession and whales and the magic continues over all 78 very large colourful pages, 29.2 x 29.4cm. Designed for ages 9-12, this is more likely to be collected by interested adults. There is an explanation of all the mythical creatures at the end such as Nüwa and Bluefish and Yanzi. Colour.