We were very excited this week in the Den as our first book from Imagination Adventures arrived! Wrapped beautifully in yellow paper and with the IA sticker proclaiming its intent to provide fascination, exploration and enraptur...ation(?) we started it straight away as a whole group and all of the children focussed in straight away on the story. There was a fantastic mix of detailed images, simple but effective designs (two wonderful cutaway pages with Dark's arm were fantastically placed), complex ideas and plenty of room to discuss emotions.

Orion is scared of many things, bikes, wardrobes, gran, monsters, the sea but the scariest thing of all is THE DARK. But one night as he shouts up at the sky above him something incredible happens: Dark comes down to meet him! Dark isn't scary, he's friendly and starts to show Orion that all the things he has been scared of... aren't really that frightening after all.

The story was warming and prompted plenty of discussion about being scared of things as well as our favourite monsters. A group of children asked to come with me and make pictures that were inspired by the book

"It's space... that's the world cos it's so big"

"I'm making the dark sky"

"Look at all my monsters!"

"The stars"

What I loved to see in the pictures that of the night sky was that they were all full of colour, exactly the same way that the dark is depicted in the book. In fact, as I brought the tissue paper out the children were directing which colours they wanted to have in response and relation to what they had just seen.

This was an excellent first book to receive from Imagination Adventures, we are looking forward to the next one!

To join us on the adventure join the Pre-School book club here: www.imaginationadventures.co.uk

Tim