Book Week 2010

Just because random sudden holidays aren’t mad enough I decided to host Book Week at my house three days after we got home.

Lilly as Lola from the book Charlie and Lola and Lani as Victoria the Violin Fairy from the Fairy series of books.

Me (I know scary, the kids painted me I’m a black dragon) As Temeraire from the Temeraire series of books that I’m hooked on at the moment and Eli as One of The Wild Things from the book Where the Wild Things Are.

I did have this brilliant idea that I would take a photo of each family group as they turned up. As you can see by the above photo this idea worked better in theory than practice.

For a start The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Pooh Bear kept running off.

Then when we finally got them to stay on the mat we realised that Puss in Boots had disappeared, which of course was such a huge disaster it required The Wild Thing, Lola and Robin Hood to form an emergency task force to locate him. Oh yeah and Pooh Bear got bored and wandered off while they were gone.

Once Puss In Boots was safely located and brought back to the mat he insisted on standing behind his brother and not in the conveniently located gap I had arranged in the group shot.

By the time I had encouraged everyone to move along so that I could see the ferocious feline the Caterpillar had given the whole thing up as a bad joke.

Though she did keep going back to the spot at random times to stand on the mat like she was wondering when the exciting thing we had all been waiting for was going to happen.

GGGRrraaaaHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! did I scare you?

This is a photo of all of some of the kids after they had talked about their chosen book character. New to the dreaded group shot is the ever so dashing King Peter from The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe and another Robin Hood. I can’t believe we had a snap in such a small group but who wouldn’t want to be Robin Hood? Such a groovy choice boys.  

Part of the audience made up of mums and kids who didn’t feel inclined to speak but still looked really cool. We have a beautiful Tinkerbelle and Angelina Ballerina The adventurous Go Diego Go! and Person from the Dora DVD and a very cute little bitie Muddle Headed Wombat.

After the kids parade I read Bear and Chook by the Sea. This book won the picture book section of the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s book awards. Then they all had the opportunity to make their own Chook out of scrunchy crape paper. I also had a table set up with sand and shells so that the kids could scratch in the sand looking for shells like chook did in the book.

I then read Clancy and Millie and the Very Fine House, which got an honourable mention. This book has beautiful illustrations of children playing with packing
boxes so I hunted around for boxes and just let them go for it. They all came and went from this activity for the rest of the day, they loved it, I would suggest a big pile of boxes whenever you have kids come around. 

Very tall boy towers.

Peekaboo!

These are some of the beautiful creations that decorated my fence while the were all here. Don’t you just love the Rainbow Punk Chicken. The paintings at the top are of cardboard box creations and are painted on cardboard to mirror the technique of Freya Blackwood when she came up with the illustrations for Clancy and Millie and the very Fine House.

All in all I think the day went well, I had a blast seeing all the little characters running around the place and I think the kids had fun, mine have only had positive things to say. I was really nervous before they turned up that the kids would just go bezerk with excitement and I wouldn’t be able to get them all to listen to me but they were all perfect angels.  Bring on Book Week 2011!