Halloween is nearly here! Read on for some spooky gifts and games, and a very special pumpkin carving template to download, created for LKP by author Helen Friel…

October is the most wonderful time of the year! The nights are drawing in, the leaves are turning, the air starts to feel colder… and Halloween is on the way. Here at LKP we have a wealth of brilliant spooky (and not too scary) books that can help celebrate the season with your young readers…

Cat's Guide to the Night Sky by Stuart Atkinson

Make those darker evenings work for you with this beautiful and practical guide to discovering the stars…

If you look up at the sky on a dark night, what do you see? There’s a whole universe staring back at you. In the company of Felicity the cat discover the phases of the moon, the constellations and how to spot the Northern Lights and the Milky Way.

Who Owns These Bones? by Henri Cap, Raphaël Martin and Renaud Vigourt

For the curious mind, the perfect inside-out lift-the-flap book.

Welcome to the secret world of skeletons! From the largest elephant to the smallest mouse, each animal is different, and that goes for their bones, too. Meet a whole host of amazing skeletons and learn about what makes each one unique, from how to tell a gorilla from a human to how to recognize a turtle just from its skull.

Lift the flaps to discover each skeleton’s animal owner, and find out amazing anatomy facts along the way! Can you work out Who Owns These Bones?

The Ultimate Spell-Caster by Mike Barfield

Comic writer and cartoonist Mike Barfield introduces the most perfectly silly way to create your very own spells…

Create your own fantastically funny spells with this amazing new flipbook. Wave your wand and flip the pages. Will you turn your dad into a flea-infested ferret wrangler or your worst enemy into a batter-coated bubble-snuffer? The Spell-Caster will decide!

Midnight Monsters by Helen Friel

All you need is a wall, a torch and your imagination for this beautiful and creative story starting book.

Switch off the lights, turn on your torch and come on a wonderful shadow adventure with Midnight Monsters! This follow-up book to the immensely popular Midnight Creatures takes you on a journey through five more beautifully crafted pop-up scenes full of hidden monsters to find, from the werewolf in the woods to the krampus in the castle. Use your torch to spot the monsters when they appear as shadows on your wall.

Helen has created a special spooky stencil which is perfect for Halloween pumpkin carving – just go to the ‘downloads and extras’ tab here to download it.

And finally, for slightly older readers, we have some imagination stretching storytelling games, that will bring a whole new illustrated dimension to storytime – and all are perfectly suited to the time of year.

Reviving the Victorian craze for ‘myrioramas’, the 20 picture cards in each set can be placed in any order to create seamless scenes. Almost infinite combinations of cards provide endless storyscaping possibilities.

The Shadow World by Shan Jiang

London, 1900. A brilliant scientist leaves the world above to create his own world below, determined to prove his radical theory – that gravity is a geometric property of spacetime. What happens when time is bent, space is collapsed and dimensions overlap? Descend into the shadow world to find out…

Mystery Mansion by Lucille Clerc

Follow the corridor through a mysterious country house and build a perpetual panorama with its inhabitants and their secrets. Find sinister suits of armour and the aftermaths of strange accidents, butlers with a grudge and glamorous couples where revenge is never far from the surface.

The Hollow Woods

Traverse an enchanted landscape as you build a perpetual panorama inhabited by fire-breathing dragons, magical unicorns and sinister shadow figures. With many games to play and millions of stories to tell, each turn of the card is a new adventure. Where will the story take you?

Happy Halloween from everyone at LKP!