In the end with Piggie excitedly waiting to hear what Gerald thinks, Gerald must come up with a way to tell Piggie that it just wasn’t musical. The kids were bursting out laughing as we read each page of “br-ip! fr-ip! gr-ark!” and so on as Gerald is knocked off his chair with each new note. Unfortunately the sounds coming out of the trumpet definitely aren’t music. In this book Piggie is excited that she’s got a new trumpet and wants to play it for Gerald. If you have not started this series you really must! My four year old (almost 5!) goes crazy over it and my 2 yr old also loves reading these books. Our family are huge Elephant and Piggie fans so I knew I had to get it. I was down in Anaheim attending the annual librarians association conference last week and one of the publishers had this book for sale. Sea Shapes is definitely a great book to brainstorm about such ideas. My daughter had a blast creating fish, divers, water falls, etc. She amazed me how many of the color blends she’s remembered. We used a lot of blues, greens and white to make the ocean and then some yellow and orange for other items. The other fun thing was blending paints together and working on what colors do you have to mix to make new colors. I loved watching what she would come up with to create using the shapes and she painted waves, waterfalls and caves. Then later we used more of the shapes and some paint to make our own ocean. I somehow missed taking a picture of the final outcome but she used the “leaf” shapes to make the fish’s tail. While my son was napping my four year old had a lot of fun using the shapes to make her own sea pictures. It was a little late to start an art project so I saved them for the next day. Luckily we have this shape sorter so I used each of the blocks to trace each shape since I have no artistic talent whatsoever. While my two and four year olds were flipping through the pictures again I grabbed a few pieces of construction paper (which I snagged at a back to school sale since we tend to go through them quickly) and started cutting out several of each shape. My two year old liked flipping through it and naming all the shapes and trying to name all the creatures that were in the book.

It takes each shape and transforms it into some fun picture in the sea from dolphins to starfish and many more.

This is a great book for introducing shapes in a fun way.

Sea Shapes by Suse MacDonald