Category: Reading and Literacy

books · Reading and Literacy · Stories

How the Leopard Got His Spots – Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories – Read Along

Shoo Rayner

The leopard is happy to be sandy-yellow and greyish-brow all over. But when he goes to the speckly-spiclkly forest, he begins to wonder if spots would be better…

A fresh, new retelling of the classic Just So Story. The author, Rudyard Kipling, also wrote the Jungle Book over a hundred years ago. How the Leopard Got His Spots has been re-written, illustrated and told by award – winning British children’s author and illustrator, Shoo Rayner, to bring it up to date with more modern ideas, language and idioms while keeping all the essential fun, language and playfulness of the original.

Get the book from amazon here in the UK Here in the USA And here in Canada

Reading and Literacy · Stories

The Cat That Walked By Himself – Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories – Read Along

Shoo Rayner

The Cat is the wildest Animal in the Wild Wet Woods. But when he sees the Man and Woman living in a warm, dry cave, he starts thinking about how he can join them…

A fresh, new retelling of the classic Just So Story. The author, Rudyard Kipling, also wrote the Jungle Book over a hundred years ago. The Cat that Walked by Himself has been re-written, illustrated and told by award – winning British children’s author and illustrator, Shoo Rayner, to bring it up to date with more modern ideas, language and idioms while keeping all the essential fun, language and playfulness of the original.

Get the book from amazon here in the UK here in the USA And here in Canada

Drawing · How to draw Ancient Greek Stuff · Illustration · Reading and Literacy

Pi Day 14th March (3.14) – Best video for non-mathematicians

Shoo Rayner
Archimedes – What a guy!

I never understood Pi. I couldn’t make it work without knowing why Pi was 3.14 etc. No one ever wanted to tell me. Like so much of Math, You have to take numbers at face value and just accept – or believe that they are real and have a reason to be special.

When I began researching Archimedes for my little book about him, I finally understood where that number came from – how the radius relates to the circumference and therefor the area of a circle. Why had no one ever told me this? So much in math classes would have made sense.

Some of us are visual thinkers. We think in pictures and understand concepts visually. Mathematicians live in cities of glass and steel where all is pattern and puzzle. Pi does not belong to mathematics alone. Pi pervades art and philosophy too and so needs to be understood and appreciated in different ways.

Show the video above to non-mathematicians and watch them go – “Oh! right! That’s amazing… now it makes sense.”

S.T.E.M. is meaningless without art and culture.

Shoo Rayner – friend of Euclid and Archimedes

To celebrate Pi Day, buy a copy of my book, Archimedes, the Man who invented the Death Ray.