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I loved this book; it’s a book I will revisit and a book I will encourage others to read because despite increasing decline and modernisation, the natural world is still on our doorstep: she is still there if we are willing to look and to appreciate her. Lets make an effort to understand her magic and (better yet) keep it alive. What we might call the ‘nature of childhood’ has changed dramatically in Britain over recent decades,” says Macfarlane, a Reader in Environmental Humanities in Cambridge University's Faculty of English. Online culture has boomed, screen time has soared and the ‘roaming range’ within which children can play and stray unsupervised has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years amid parental fears about traffic, ‘stranger danger’ and the pressure of school work.” The spells are even better and I love the fact that it says explicitly ‘this is a book of spells to be spoken aloud’. Everything about it is absolutely beautiful and we will be getting behind it in a big way,” he said.
The Lost Spells is a celebration of the natural; it is a collection of prose poetry about foxes and trees and birds and rabbits and flowers: it is an elegy to what we are losing and what we must try to retain. Something special happened in my mind and heart when he read out his spells. It was hearing the combination of the beauty of wildlife and the lyricism or melody of each word, that set my mind on fire in a sense! That's when I knew my first Robert Macfarlane book had to be the lost spells! Wonderful activities and ideas celebrating the magic of nature and language which can be used standalone or consecutively as a cross-curricular scheme of work in English, Science, Art, PSHE and to support research skills. Each section takes one of the animals or items from nature featured in each spell, and invites children to Seek, Find, Speak, Write and/or Create their response with extracts and illustrations from the book to support and inspire learning: TheFolk by the Oak festival team, proud commissioners of Spell Songs, were thrilled with the release of this wonderfully inventive, dazzlingly beautiful bookand the opportunity to create new music with the Spell Songs Ensemble! As some of you may know, I'm an illustrator myself, and one of my favorite things to illustrate is wildlife, nature and landscapes.The book has taken on a 'wild life' of its own with the sparks of inspiration taking it in numerous creative directions. Puffin is an imprint of Penguin Random House, the world’s number-one publisher representing a vibrant community of publishing houses marked by unparalleled success. Through our world of stories, Puffin aims to open up the world to every child. Our mission is to inspire children to feel they can be and do anything, and to create readers for life. A book about spells that succeeds in being spell-binding in its own right . . . It already feels like a true classic. Buy one copy for yourself and any others for as many children as you can afford' Books for Keeps The love of and for nature that Macfarlane and Morris are feeling is palpable - and infectuous. I also found myself learning the odd thing or two while reading their books. A timeless, stunning gift to be pored over and cherished for years - dazzlingly beautiful and richly inventive, discover the magical new book from the creators of The Lost Words
ROBERT MACFARLANE is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the author of a number of bestselling and prize-winning books, including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway, Landmarks, and Underland, which won the Wainwright Prize. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for film, television, and radio. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E. M. Forster Award for Literature in 2017. He is a word collector and mountain climber -- and he has three children who have taught him more about the world than any book. The book began as a response to the removal of everyday nature words - among them "acorn", "bluebell", "kingfisher" and "wren" - from a widely used children’s dictionary, because those words were not being used enough by children to merit inclusion. But The Lost Words then grew to become a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world around us, as well as a celebration of the creatures and plants with which we share our lives, in all their wonderful, characterful glory." Puffin started out as a non-fiction publisher, with its first title appearing in 1940. As the most iconic and well-known children’s book brand in the UK today, we are always on the lookout for innovative ways to tell the world’s favourite stories and for brilliant new debut talent and brands that connect with today’s young readers, from newborn up to twelve years old. In London, The Big Green Bookshop took only four days to raise enough funds to donate a book to the primary schools in the London Borough of Haringey.Only a year after publication, the book had won two literary prizes and been translated into several languages. For me, personally, that book was beautiful but too large (impractical) and seeing this new collaboration, I probably wasn't the only one. Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. After Macfarlane read the ‘Pokémon paper’ (a study published in Science in 2002 by Professor Andrew Balmford from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology), he started to gather other evidence of a loss of ‘nature-literacy’. A National Trust survey, for instance, showed that half of children couldn’t tell the difference between a wasp and a bee, yet almost all could name a Dalek; and a three-year RSPB research project found only one in five children in Britain are ‘positively connected to nature’. A major work for children’s choir and orchestra has been co-commissioned from composer James Burton by the Boston Symphony (USA) and Hallé Orchestra (Manchester, UK) for premiere performances in 2019 (Boston) and 2020 (Hallé).
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