books

April has been and gone — and we’ve loved soaking up a bit more sunshine this month (while happily eating our body weight in Easter eggs!).

We’ve rounded up some of our favourite activities, book reviews, and parenting articles from April — just in case you missed anything.

👣 What Have We Been Up To? Family Fun at Dartmeet on Dartmoor

This month we headed off to Dartmeet on...

Libraries Unlimited launches ‘Libro’s Friends’ adventure across Devon and Torbay

An exciting new early years reading programme with stickers to collect has been launched in libraries across Devon and Torbay, aiming to inspire a lifelong love of reading.

Libro’s Friends is an extension of Libraries Unlimited’s hugely successful The Secret Book Quest, which was launched in...

Ladybird Launches Engaging and Interactive Book, Just in Time for the King’s Coronation!

Ladybird is thrilled to introduce a colourful new page-turner this spring, the interactive lift-the-flap adventure, The King’s Crown . Ready to royally inspire little readers, the engaging story book will help little ones join in with the magic of the King’s Coronation through vibrant illustrations and a...

As reading attainment rises in schools, reading for pleasure continues its sharp decline To mark World Book Day 2023, the charity is calling on teachers, carers and parents to ensure that reading for pleasure [1] is encouraged as much as reading attainment, in and outside of schools.

While reading was the only core subject which saw attainment levels improve in 2022, (at Key Stage 2, 75% of...

This has been another one of our favourite bedtime stories, so was another great choice for us to turn into a tuff tray activity.

What you need for this activity

• Tuff tray
• Princess
• Dragon
• Knight
• King
• A unicorn
• A lion
• A mermaid

We were lucky that we had a toy castle to use, but you can...

Global fairytale popularity report: which classic children’s fairytales have reached the most success overseas

Fairytales have played a fairly large role in many childhoods across the globe, helping parents to introduce their children to moral values through their parables whilst also aiding children’s language development and reading skills. Many have been used as bedtime stories to help...

The Tiger who came to Tea is such a lovely book, which we love reading at bedtime. As my children love it so much, I used it to make a tuff tray activity.

I had to be quite resourceful to create this tray and dipped into lots of different toy boxes to get all the characters, but it was well worth it for the fun we had.

What you need for your tuff tray:

• Sophie character •...

This tuff tray activity was lots of fun and helped get my children back into reading one of our much-loved bedtime story books.

What you need for this tuff tray activity

• Tuff tray
• Farmer
• Farm animals – horse, cow, hen, dog, cats, duck, sheep, pig and goose
• Two bad men – lanky Len and hefty Hugh
• Getaway car
• Ladybird
...

Twinkl are celebrating National Story Telling Week 2023 by encouraging children to get inspired by the stories they read by taking creative control of a brand new Twinkl Originals storybook.

Global Educational Resource Publishing company, Twinkl are aiming to help close the gap amongst children who read for pleasure by inspiring more children to learn to love reading.

A recent study...

Children’s Mental Health week runs from 6 th -13 th February 2023 and this year the theme is “Let’s Connect” with a focus on making meaningful connections to support mental health. (Source: https://www.childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk/)

At Summersdale we are passionate about supporting children’s mental health and over the past few years we have built a dedicated list of titles for children...