Mummy's Little Sunflowers {Book Review}

We have so many books in our cupboard at the moment waiting to be read, enjoyed and reviewed, that we haven’t set a PlayLearning theme for this week – we’ll focus on catching up on our books for now instead. Today’s book is perfect for this time of year in a number of categories: Spring, planting, sunflowers and even Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday).

About Mummy’s Little Sunflowers

Age: 3 -5
Pages: 32
Format: Hardback
Little Tiger Press

It’s called Mummy’s Little Sunflowers, and is one of those lump-in-the-throat stories about two little mice who decide to plant sunflowers for their other. The youngest mouse, Scamp, eats the seed, leaving big brother Scurry very disappointed that they can’t grow a sunflower for Mummy anymore. The boys come up with a plan, however, and make their own sunflower masks. The book deals with creative problem solving – like getting a cow to lift them to a top of a sunflower so they can eat as many seeds as their tummies can handle – and still having sunflowers to give to their mama. It deals with kindness, when Scurry accepts what happened to the seeds, and it deals with a mother’s love for her children – a topic that never goes out of fashion here. I also particularly love the illustrations in this picture. They are just delightfully beautiful, summery and full of that warmth’ a real sunflower gives you.

Themed Activities For Mummy’s Little Sunflowers

This book also gives you loads of opportunities for learning, and activities for ‘sunflower’ themed play. The most obvious one is planting your own sunflowers. Bizarrely, sunflowers aren’t that easy to grow! We have planted over 10 seeds so far this year, and at the moment, we have four still alive and kicking, and we just planted a new batch this week. Hopefully we’ll have better luck as the weather warms up.

The wait between planting your seeds and actually having sunflower faces smile down on you is a long one, so in the meantime we made a Sunflower from a torn up box, and yellow and orange paint. (I think it looks more like a sun, but Ameli insists that it is her sunflower. Who am I to argue with an artists interpretation?) By the way, I bought a cheapie glue gun for these heavier-duty craft projects, and it has been brilliant!