Books are such a great way of helping your child learn about new things. We read them not just for stories, but to help little miss when she’s struggling with something. She’s 3 and a half and really loves to play outside and explore. She sometimes gets freaked out though by new things in the garden, particularly new sounds and things that move! I’ve been looking for a book to try and help with this so when the opportunity came along to review “Who Hides Here? Footprints in the Garden” I thought it would be a great way of helping understand more about the animals that visit the garden.
Who Hides Here? looks at the footprints of some of the most commons garden visitors. Each animal has a story that rhymes to explain a bit about them. The book is written by Rachel Coverdale and is illustrated by Neil Thompson. We received a free copy so that we could review it.
The book arrived the day we went on holiday so I took it with us. Little miss loved reading the book as soon as she saw it. She enjoyed looking at the different shapes of footprint and guessing which animal they belonged to. She quickly picked up some of the rhymes after a few reads through. As well as the story, there are some puzzles at the back of the book. There’s also a page where you can stick a photo of your child in too.
We were holidaying along the Northumbrian coastline and managed to catch some lovely weather. A day at the beach seemed like the perfect time to put into practice what we’d read about. Little miss quickly found a lot of dog prints and loved following them. At first, she ran in the opposite direction when she realised there was an actual dog making the prints! It didn’t take her long though to gain a bit of confidence, particularly when she remembered from the book that wagging tails meant dogs were happy.
We came across a lot of seagulls prints in the wet sand so she followed those. She also loved seeing how her feet left prints in the sand too.
Who Hides Here? is a lovely way of teaching your child about the types of animals that live outside. Little miss loves it and seems a bit more confident about meeting new animals outside. Hopefully if our friendly hedgehog comes back to our garden next year, she’ll recognise his footprints.