'My Ballerina jigsaw Book' is a beautiful and inspiring book about ballet which is suitable for any small girl who loves to dance - and it also has the bonus of containing six lovely twenty four piece jigsaw puzzles.
My four and a half year old daughter absolutely loves her ballet (and she's also pretty keen on puzzles too!) so when I saw this book I knew it was something she would really like! I wasn't wrong!
The book is written by Sian Baily and has six double page spreads which tell the story and illustrate a scene from different ballets. These are Cinderella, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, The Firebird and The Nutcracker (which I guess are probably the most famous ballets). For each ballet a large illustration takes up the whole of one page and this unravels to become a jigsaw puzzle.
The stories which accompany the six ballets are all quite succinct and to the point. They basically just pick out the key events in the story and don't go into anything in great detail. Having said that though, the language is very accessible for young children and it makes it easy to then understand what is going on in the pictures. I also found it interesting as an adult because I didn't really know the stories of Coppelia and The Firebird until I read this with my daughter.
Of course the story elements are only one part of this book, and although my daughter was interested in having the stories read to her, she was very impatient to get on and try and do the puzzles!
The first thing to say about these is that all the illustrations are very beautiful and detailed. My daughter loves the ballerinas in their beautiful costumes and their pink ribboned ballet shoes. She also likes to have a go at trying out the positions that she sees the ballerinas taking in the pictures. All in all, every picture really does give a very good flavour for the ballet it is illustrating. they also have an almost mystical feel to them!
As I said earlier each jigsaw has twenty four pieces. This is not too many for four year olds and upwards and normally I would buy my daughter a puzzle with more pieces. However, because of the size of the page (which is a little less than A4) it would really be impossible to have more pieces. When you first open the book you see that all of the jigsaws are attached firmly within the page. The first job then is to get all the bits out and to separate them. This is quite a tricky task especially as there is no small hole or corner to push out which would give you a start. I really recommend a parent doing this job as it would easily be possible for an over enthusiastic child to bend or break the pieces before they had even started. The pieces are of strong cardboard though, so once separated they do seem to hold up pretty well.
You can either then assemble the jigsaw on a table or other flat area, or do what we do, which is to build it up in the frame in the book. This means that once complete, it is already back in the book ready for next time. Doing the puzzle itself is fun for my daughter, but at this stage not ever so challenging. But then this book is about more than just the jigsaw puzzles - it's the whole ballerina package!
At the back of the book after all the puzzles there is a sort of quiz page. There are some questions asked about the actual stories in the ballets an also there are different things to count up in all the pictures. My daughter seems to really like these challenges!
Overall the book is very strong and sturdy. It is also quite thick because all the pages are made of hard cardboard so that they can hold the puzzles successfully, It's a very enjoyable book and also quite inspiring for budding ballerinas. It does have a RRP of £9.99 but I bought our copy for less than half that price through The Book People!
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