 Hi everyone my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and today I have a picture book review of Shadow Catchers by Kirsty Murray and Karen Blair and this is an absolutely gorgeous little storybook. Thank you very much to Alan and Unwin the publisher for sending it to me, this does come out very early in May and I am very very excited to share this with you. So I'm going to start with the blurb on the back. On sunshiny mornings we go shadow catching inside outside at home and in our neighborhood shadows dance around us from morning through to night. Our shadows are so tall, then small, then tall again in sunlight, lamp light and even in the moonlight. This book is just gorgeous, it has a really lovely soft watercolor palette which I absolutely adore. I just thoroughly loved how joyful and how playful this book was as these two siblings explore their shadows in a variety of different ways throughout the day, in different locations, they're at home, they're at the playground, they're using different sources of light and they just explore that with such open-minded wonder and it's really really lovely. It has great sibling representation, these kids obviously get along really really well. It also addresses towards the end some childhood fears like night and the shadows that sometimes you get from different lights at night and how that changes from being fun during the day to being something that can be quite scary for kids because they don't necessarily understand it and I love the relationship that this family have and how they turn that possible fee into something that is fun by exploring it and explaining it and understanding that it's just a shadow, it's not something to be afraid of. This is a really great text that could 100% be used in a classroom, I mean straight away we're talking about shadows so you've got plenty of opportunities to explore light and shadows through a science unit and to use this as a jumping-off point as a discussion for that. It'd even be a really great thing to read before just an exploration of shadows. What kind of shadows can you create with your body? Can you create different shapes? Where do you need your light sources from? It can just be a jumping-off point for play and I think that's a really great sign of a text because kids learn through play and something like this that inspires them to play with intent is also awesome. I mean it's just a great read aloud. The text is lyrical and is great to listen to when read aloud. If I was using this for the class I would probably do that exploration and play with shadows and have kids try and create different shapes with shadows and take photos of them and then you can then use that as a jumping-off point for a writer's notebook lesson or for creating a class book about shadows either for independent shared pen or modeled writing and I was even thinking about creating shadow puppets that kids can then use and then can create stories and then orally tell stories as well. This has a lot of uses in the classroom aside from just being a beautiful reader loud and I had a really great time reading it. Thank you again to the publishers for sending this to me. I will leave links to the title where you can find out more information about it as well as the author and illustrator down below. If you have read this or you're planning on picking it up feel free to have a chat to me in the comments about it otherwise if you just want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a sun emoji down below. I hope that wherever you're in the world just staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.