A Penguin Bedtime Story: Postcards From the Same Snowdrift

This penguin bedtime story follows Pella as she discovers several postcard pictures in one familiar snowdrift. Read the complete original story below, followed by a small idea for telling it together.

Postcards From the Same Snowdrift

Pella the penguin received a postcard from her cousin. It showed a green hill with a tree on top. Beneath the picture her cousin had written, "This is what I can see from my door."

Pella looked out of her own door. Snow. A low ridge of snow. Beyond that, some taller snow. She turned the postcard over and admired the tree again.

"I have nothing to send," she told her neighbor Tuck.

Tuck leaned into the doorway. "You have that excellent ridge."

"It is snow."

"So it is."

Pella cut a rectangle from her drawing paper and painted the ridge. White paint on white paper did not explain much. She added a blue shadow underneath. Now it looked like a floating sausage. Tuck said he liked it very much, but Pella put it aside.

That afternoon she carried her paper to the ridge itself. Up close, the snow had a tiny curved lip where the wind had brushed it. Pella drew the curve. A little farther along, someone had left a chain of footprints. She drew those too, including the place where both feet had slid together.

At the far end she found a small hollow protected from the breeze. She sat down to sharpen her pencil. From that spot the whole village appeared between two white slopes, with Tuck standing outside his door holding an empty cup.

"Would you like something warm?" he called.

Pella waved her pencil. "I am away at the moment."

She made another picture. Then she walked behind the ridge, where she could see only sea and sky. She used nearly all her blue pencil on that card. By the time she came home, she had four pictures and very cold toes.

Tuck brought a pot of warm berry juice. They arranged the postcards around Pella's cup. The floating sausage looked rather fine beside the others, so she kept it.

On the back of each card she wrote a short message. "This is my ridge from the door." "This is where someone slipped." "This is my village when I am almost away."

The last card said, "This is the sea behind everything."

Pella tied the cards together for the morning post. She placed her cousin's green hill above the table, then looked out at the ridge until the blue shadows grew long.

Make this telling your own

Invite your child to describe one view from your own window, then give that detail to a penguin postcard. Avoid turning the reading into a test about which card belongs to whom. The changing viewpoints do the work on their own. If your child wants to draw afterward, a blank rectangle is enough; the message can be a mark, a picture or a dictated sentence.

Day2Tale creates personalized, narrated stories.

Sources: Day2Tale support and product features