1. The Hippo’s Mouth and The Train By Daphne Babouris Colleges Children’s Centre

2. Yani was very interested in the giant Duplo bricks, and liked the idea of loading up a truck and taking his bounty off with him. Mrs Babouris asked him how many blocks he was collecting, “About... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,... (randomly counting but meaning A LOT!)

3. He’d got this great idea from Pete, who was busy doing the same. Pete was going to make a robot.

4. Mrs Babouris didn’t know of Yani’s clever idea of taking the blocks to a good place to build them. But, as she watched him walking slowly, and looking around the garden, she knew he was going to do something very interesting.

5. Yani put two cube-shaped, duplo blocks, one red the other blue, down onto the bench. From his wooden truck, he pulled out a third block, but it had a different shape. Yani liked to tell Mrs Babouris what he was doing and she liked to watch. “I’m building a house...(then, stopping to examine the symbol on the cuboid block, noted) that’s a hippo’s mouth”

6. He had decided to use the long thin bench for a very good reason...”I’m making a train!”.. Yani could see the shape of the brick-like blocks were like train carriages. (Suddenly, everything was explained to Mrs Babouris and Yani could now get on with his important work project.

7. Yani worked silently for a long time, putting in lots of train carriages. Mrs Babouris asked how many carriages the train had now? He touched each block to calculate the answer to this question, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,” Then, looked at all the carriages, “I’ve got one more other carriage,...that makes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10...(and, as he was getting to the bigger numbers, he remembered some really big numbers he knew, “ 73,74,75... That makes 8”.

8. Yani selected a special curved block for the front of the train. He scoured all the garden for a long while, looking for the last, important bit of the train, the funnel. Good at finding the right shape, he came back with a fat, round piece of wooden log, put it in front of him, and sat down as the ‘Train Driver’.

9. Next Week, when it is Book and Storytelling week, Mrs Babouris will read Yani’s ‘The Hippo’s Mouth and Train’ to his friends, at story time.

10. Yani can show this book to his mummy daddy, brother and two sisters, at home. We will wait to see if there are any special stories that have happened at home, that Yani’s family want to tell Nursery about!