In The Night Garden 123

Count from 1 all the way to 10 with Igglepiggle and his friends in the Night Garden. With simple text and bright, vibrant colours, this chunky board book is a perfect way to introduce counting to little In the Night Garden fans.

It's Igglepiggle's birthday - but it seems that all of his friends in the Night Garden have forgotten! Igglepiggle is sad to find that nobody wants to play today. But there are a few things going on around the garden that Igglepiggle hasn't spotted. Makka Pakka is painting a special stone, the Tombliboos are hanging bunting, and the Pontipines have made a cake . . . Maybe Igglepiggle's friends haven't forgotten his birthday after all! Little fans of In the Night Garden will love this beautifully illustrated picture book, filled with all their favourite characters from the show.

A delightfully offbeat story that features an opinionated tortoise and her owner who find themselves in the middle of a life-changing mystery. Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s something, well, odd about her. And we soon know that Audrey’s quest to discover who her father really was – and reunite with Winnifred – will be an adventure like no other. Excerpt: Winnifred is old. She might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff, was embarking on a rock-climbing adventure that would not have been much fun for Winnifred. Back then her name was Iris. Cliff had inherited Iris from the previous tenant. Nobody knew how old Iris was or where she had come from originally. Now Cliff was moving out. He said, Would you like a tortoise. I would not say no to a tortoise, I said. I was alone in Portland and the trees were giant. I picked her up and she blinked at me with her upside-down eyelids. I felt instantly calm. Her eyes were soft brown. Her skin felt like an old elbow. I will build you a castle, I whispered. With a pool. And I was true to my word.

From Newbery Honor and National Book Award–winning author Polly Horvath is this magical middle-grade novel about a garden that grants wishes. It is World War II, and Franny and her parents, Sina and Old Tom, enjoy a quiet life on a farm on Vancouver Island. Franny writes, Sina sculpts, and Old Tom tends to their many gardens—including the ancient, mysterious night garden. Their peaceful life is interrupted when their neighbor, Crying Alice, begs Sina to watch her children while she goes to visit her husband at the military base because she suspects he’s up to no good. Soon after the children move in, letters arrive from their father that suggest he's about to do something to change their lives; and appearances from a stubborn young cook, UFOs, hermits, and ghosts only make life stranger. Can the forbidden night garden that supposedly grants everyone one wish help them all out of trouble? And if so, at what cost? The Night Garden is a poignant and hilarious story from acclaimed children's author Polly Horvath.

Digital devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers, are becoming commonplace in young children’s lives for play, entertainment, learning and communication. Recently, there has been a great deal of focus on the educational potential of these devices in both formal and informal educational settings. There is now an abundance of educational ‘apps’ available to children, parents, and teachers, which claim to enhance children’s early literacy and numeracy development, but to date, there has been very little formal investigation of the educational potential of these devices. This book discusses the impact on children’s learning when iPads were introduced in three very different early years settings in Brisbane, Australia. It outlines how researchers worked with pre-school teachers and parents to explore how iPads can assist with letter and word recognition, the development of oral literacy and digital literacies and talk around play. Chapters consider the possibilities for using iPads for creativity and arts education through photography, storytelling, drawing, music creation and audio recording, and critically examine the literacies enabled by educational software available on iPads, and the relationship between digital play and literacy development. iPads in the Early Years provides exciting insights into children’s digital culture and learning in the age of the iPad. It will be key reading for researchers, research students and teacher educators focusing on the early years, as well as those with an interest in the role of ICTS, and particularly tablet computers, in education.