Moon and Me: The Little Seed

Whenever the moon shines brightly on a toy doll called Pepi Nana, wonderful things happen inside the Toy House. She wakes up and walks around – tiddle toddle – and because she’s so magical, Pepi Nana can even talk and play!

One night at the beginning of this book Pepi Nana decides to write a letter to the moon. ‘Please come to tea and we can have a story,’ she says, and sends her letter with a kiss. Away it goes, ‘lovingly out of the window’ and all the way to the moon, where it finds Moon Baby on an icy throne. Bringing his magical music with him, Moon Baby flies to the Toy House and wakes Pepi Nana’s friends for an adventure. There’s something special in the curiosity box … what could it be? Mr Onion, Dibillo, Colly Wobble and the others join Pepi Nana to scrunch tissue-paper flowers, sing songs and make a special visit to Storyland to plant a magic seed and watch it grow…

This brand-new story from the creator of the CBeebies preschool TV show Moon and Me translates the child-friendly styling and magical ambience of the original animations into traditional book format. Fully illustrated in colour and divided into short chapters to encourage families to ‘get the bedtime story habit’, the book introduces the toys and sets the scene for the gentle adventure that follows, immersing young audiences in an appealingly imaginative world that encourages language acquisition and will prompt their own creative play.

Andrew Davenport studied speech science before moving into theatre and TV. He is the award-winning creator of In the Night Gardenand Teletubbies, and his extraordinary success is based on painstaking research into what interests young children and how they learn. Moon and Me’s narrative was inspired by classic 1930’s stories about toys that come to life, and while he was developing the show, Davenport set up cameras inside a toy house to observe how children played with them – apparently stairs are a fascination, as are tea parties. Despite its contemporary aesthetic, the TV show has a distinctly traditional feel, both in terms of concept and content, and in its styling and production values, with stop-motion animation and puppetry taking the place of computer-generated imagery.

Davenport’s emphasis on active, sociable play that doesn’t involve screens is apparent in the tissue-paper flower-making and storysharing at the heart of this book. Interspersed with rhymes – friendship is a seed we sow, water it and watch it grow– and designed to enable young children and their carers to enjoy stories and language and become confident around books, Moon and Me: The Little Seed will be deservedly popular.