New DIY Peppa Pig Fairytale Popup Book

Let's jam a fairytale storybook on a $10 budget with bits and pieces from a local budget store and some discarded household materials.

With remnants of a used Peppe Pig activity book lying somewhere under the couch and another discarded paper bag with high-quality animal pattern prints stacked alongside other old shopping bags, we could decide whether to rid them or reuse them. The rest, as they said, was history.

There were no plots, story-tellers, readers, or listeners. To "read" the storybook, we needed only participants, facilitators, and a little imagination. The participants (toddlers) would move the cut-out paper animals around the "board" and decide how best the story should unfold. Meanwhile, the facilitator (adult) would hold the participant's little hands to pen the story with glitter-dust colour inks on reserved spaces of the book itself - giving toddlers gratifications of their very own "publishing" experience.

Inspiration was drawn from a Norwegian fairytale classic namely Three Billy Goats Gruff. The motivation and concept behind the project were to interest toddlers into storytelling, an early introduction to literacy, through a "3D interface" (a.k.a popup book). There were cut-out paper crocodiles, frogs, giraffes, tigers, elephants, zebras and snakes kept "pocket-side" of the book to create unlimited story variations. The book was completed in an afternoon's time with help from two toddlers.