A World Full of Animal Stories: 50 favourite animal folk tales, myths and legends

This book allows you to travel the world as you learn the folk tales and origins behind some of the animals that inhabit the each country. Accompanied by beautiful illiustrations, these short tales are easy to follow and understand, even for children as young as five. The mixture of well known and new stories also works well to make sure anyone can access the book. For example, many children will be familiar with the story of The Three Little Pigs, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and The Ugly Duckling and will enjoy reading them again but they will equally enjoy learning about different cultures through the telling of other stories such as How the Kangaroo Got Her Pouch, Why Hippo Lives in the Water and The Nodding Tiger. This collection of stories was used well in a topic about 'Around the World' and, being short in their length, we were able to read many of the stories when we had a few spare minutes in our day. Primarily used to help us learn about countries in the world and where to find them, we also found good quality links to English and PHSE through working with this book. The children enjoyed locating the countries and continents once they had heard their stories and making comparisons to stories they had already heard. The children even worked towards writing their own country themed stories in an attempt to create their own book for our own library. The morals within some of the stories allowed for deep and meaningful circle time discussions. Overall, this book is a wonderful collections of short stories which would only improve any library it becomes part of. 127 pages / Ages 5+ / Reviewed by Kyle Matravers, teacher.

Suggested Reading Age 5+