Fairy Tale Week at Ape 2 Zebra!

Bushels of berries!


What fun we had at Ape 2 Zebra last week.


Darla decided to declare it Fairy Tale Week at the Toy Shop in honour of Jakob Grimm’s birthday. Jakob Grimm is one of my favourite authors, and so I and the other Animal Associates were delighted to dive into the daily decrees.


Jakob Grimm’s birthday was on January 4, and so we started the fairy tale festivities that day with Darla’s Top Pick for the week, The Barefoot Book of Fairy Tales, retold by Malachy Doyle and illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli. It’s bursting with beguiling stories of things that happened once upon a time in lands that are far, far away, and I think you and your little ones will love it as much as we do.


The next day, Darla and Cornel worked together to suggest some Ape 2 Zebra toys that fit with Fairy Tale Week. Darla suggested Haba’s Sleepy Princess and the Pea game. Cornel chose the beary special Haba Dragonstone Castle soft toy set, which had magically appeared at the Toy Shop that very day. What a wonder! We had waited for it for what felt like weeks that would never end.


Wishing you knew what we did the next day? Well, we made our own family fairy tales, and you can too. All you need is to have one member of your pack start the story with "Once upon a time" and give a few lines of a scenario. Then "pass the story off" to the next family member, whose job it is to explain what happens next. You can give each person a set amount of time to tell their part of the tale (e.g. one or two minutes), or you can choose some other way to take turns. Keep going until everyone has had a chance to talk, and your story is finished. You can even write it down afterward, and draw pictures too. I think it would be fantastic fun to return to read those stories in the future.


Fairy dust also worked its way into the Ape 2 Zebra kitchen. We whipped up some wonderful wands made of cantaloupe, and watched them disappear like magic right off the plate!


To finish our festivities off, we each made our own very beary special crowns, with beary special royal titles, and we wore them when we went to dinner. It was fabulous to be “King of the Cookie Jar.”


If you want to follow our frolics as they unfold, be sure to find us on Facebook. We love to see our friends there!