Just So Stories: How the Leopard Got His Spots by Shoo Rayner (author)

Long ago in the dawn of time, before the world was sorted into the shapes it is in today, there lived a leopard in the Ethiopian High Veldt: a leopard with no spots. But when all the game went and hid in the trees to dodge the leopard’s hungry claws, the leopard discovered that the only way to hunt his prey in those dark spots was to get spots himself!

Rudyard Kipling’s timeless fable, retold in this young edition, draws on Indian and African folklore to tell a story that sweeps readers back into the primal world. Bringing a burst of exotic flavour into the classroom, and shimmering with unusual, comical language for little tongues to wrap themselves around, it is both a fabulous story and a fresh, imaginative way to get children thinking about the origins, forms and uses of things.