Peppa Visits the Australian Rainforest

Peppa Pig

Ladybird, 2021

10pp., board book., RRP $A14.99

9780241519226

Peppa Pig and her family are on holiday in Australia visiting her friend Kylie Kangaroo and they are all off to visit the Australian rainforest.  To guide their explorations, they have a scavenger hunt to complete and so each page has a lift-the-flap experience to discover. 

As with her other Australian adventures , this is a novel way to introduce our youngest readers to environments and the creatures that live in them that they may not be familiar with.  Combining familiar characters and the interactivity of the lift-the-flap format, preschoolers can start to develop conceptual ideas and vocabulary about Australian landscapes and habitats they are likely to encounter in other stories.  It also offers the opportunity to introduce atlases and other non fiction texts if the astute adult asks questions such as “If we wanted to visit the rainforest, where would we have to go?”  or “What other things might they have found in the rainforest?’ or even, “Why does it rain so much in the rainforest?”  There is always the opportunity to model questions that start new investigations.