The Unicorn's Rainbow🦄

After a grey morning, the unicorn carries your child up through the clouds. Each world has lost its colour in a different way: in the red world, the strawberries have turned pale; in the orange world, the autumn leaves have lost their glow; and in the yellow world, the sunflowers have stopped turning towards the sun. Your child helps each world with whatever it needs: an idea, a gift or an act of kindness.

Further on lie the green forest, the blue sea, the indigo night and the violet valley, and finally the cloud castle, where the answer to the puzzle can be found. Somewhere along the way, your child discovers why the colours disappeared. The book reveals how the rainbow returns.

This idea is for children who put rainbows in every drawing, change their favourite colour every week or love horses and magical creatures. It’s also just right for a rainy day, when the grey outside the window looks a lot like the beginning of the story.

A three-year-old can learn the names of the colours and point them out, one by one, on each page. An eight-year-old gets seven little adventures, each with a problem to solve, and can talk about which world was the trickiest and which was the most beautiful.

Tell us your child’s favourite colour, and its world can have a little extra space in the story. A friend or sibling can ride along on the unicorn’s back, and the family cat can appear in one of the worlds. If your child has a drawing they’re proud of, its subject could be woven into the story, while a favourite jumper or cuddly toy could add a little sparkle to the pictures.

Once you’ve read the book, you can make a rainbow of your own. On a sunny day, stand with the sun behind you and spray a fine mist from a garden hose. See if you can spot the colours in the droplets. Name them in order and talk about which of the seven worlds you’d most like to visit. Find more magical stories under Unicorns.