Books, booklets & multimedia

Elfa and the box of memories

	Price: £9.95	BAAF, May 2008 ISBN 978 1 905664 42 9

Memories can be good and bad, happy and sad; those we want to keep alive and others we would rather forget. Looked after children may have more difficult memories that most, because of separation and loss and traumatic events that may have taken place. In this charming picture book, Elfa the elephant discovers that sharing her memories and remembering the good things that happened is more helpful than keeping them locked away.

Elfa goes through life carrying a big, heavy box on her back. Inside it, she keeps her most precious things – her memories. One day, while playing with a group of warthogs, a ball comes whizzing past and hits the box on Elfa’s back. Elfa starts to shout and angrily stamps her feet.

Just then, Marvin the monkey swings down from the top of a tree, and asks what’s wrong. Elfa tells Marvin how cross she is that nobody has ever asked her about the big box on her back, and that it is full of her most precious memories, and sometimes she just wants to talk about them with someone else. And so they open her box to have a look at her memories. But suddenly, Elfa notices that some memories have just faded away. Elfa is tearful, and wonders what she is going to do. And so begins a journey to find the missing memories by revisiting significant places and people and remember the important things from her past.

This book reinforces the importance of memories and the part they play in making us who we are. Adults can use this story as an aid to doing life story work with young children, to help them remember the good times and also the bad, thus helping them deal with troubled pasts.

A booklet called My Book of Memories is included at the back of the book, for children to draw and write the things they remember.

Extra copies of My Book of Memories are available to purchase separately.