There are downsides to having “bright ideas”, particularly the time it takes to turn them into reality. Tomorrow, the toddler’s group is continuing it’s animal theme by looking at behemoth and leviathan (bright idea #1). Those are beasts mentioned towards the end of the book of Job. Many commentators suggest they might be a hippo and a crocodile but neither of the descriptions particularly match. For example, hippos don’t have tails like a cedar tree and crocodiles don’t breathe out smoke and fire. I’d say that a brontosaurus and a dragon fit at least as well although, yes, I am aware that raises other questions. The core lesson is wonder at the sheer variety of beasts, birds and fish to be found across the world.

Bright idea #2 was an activity involving beasts that could be cut out in various sections and joined together to make animals no-one has seen before. I’m sure I’ve seen it illustrated with 19th century line drawings (surely out of copyright) but I couldn’t find them. I ended up adapting some images of domestic animals, resizing them so that they can be folded in half and roughly joined up.

What is a rabkey? The combination of a rabbit and a donkey of course. Even the stage of adding labels turned out to be time consuming. With a random selection of animals, based on the source images I could find, some were hard to pronounce and others not entirely suitable. I had to take some time to avoid inappropriate pairings, like certain combinations that are possible between cow and duck!

It has been an interesting exercise but a lot more time consuming than I thought. I hope some of the children, or at least their parents and guardians, appreciate the fun of things like the goig (goose and pig, if you were wondering).