Peppa Pig (2019)Peppa enters an art competition at the aquarium with a drawing of some beautiful coloured fish. Mummy Pig says there’s nothing wrong with using your imagination, but does Peppa actually know more than she is letting on? Peppa wins the competition and the family travel to Australia to go diving in the Great Barrier Reef. They spot so many amazing sea creatures, including Peppa’s ‘imaginary’ fish!
This new Peppa Pig adventure comes to life with bright and colourful illustrations that draw the reader in. A framing technique used to ‘contain’ the sea creature images in the first half of the book gives way to lovely full colour pages of the reef when Peppa, her family and her teacher go diving with Mrs Kangaroo.
The book is relatively text heavy but would be suitable as a read aloud to target audiences. Young readers will enjoy sharing in the new ‘Australian’ Peppa story, with opportunities to join in (there’s some fun onomatopoeia: whoosh, toco toco, splash) and lots of potential for discussions around sea creatures, drawing, transport and counting. As always, the faces of characters are clearly drawn, with children able to make inferences about how a character might be feeling from their expressions: happy, surprised or worried (just look at Daddy Pig’s face in the plane). I also liked the inclusion of simple maps as part of Mrs Kangaroo’s diving plan. The visuals are really clear and could lead to fun discussions about language including prepositions such as under, near and next to, as well talk about maps and their purposes.
Finally, Peppa’s spotting of the rare blue clownfish could provide a gentle introduction to the idea of endangered species, appropriately juxtaposed alongside the optimism of joy and discovery in nature.
Nicole Tainsh - Deputy Principal, Instructional Leadership, Granville East Public School