On Friday, we decided to have a book day.  Owl had suggested it when we were tidying the children’s bedrooms last weekend and I commented that we had more books than we could ever have time to read.  I really liked the idea of a whole day centred around books, so we did it.  After Owl and Monkey were back from their early morning violin lessons, and while Tiddler was at his Musicbox class with Supergirl, we started with a little bit of time working on the Gruffalo and Gruffalo’s Child activity books.  After that the children collected all the soft toys they could find that were story characters, then hunted for as many of the matching books as possible.  They then spent a long time setting up displays of each set of books and toys, and we talked about the possibility of making some story sacks.  We have done this before, for Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Three Little Pigs, but it was a couple of years ago and the contents have long since been scattered around the house (and some of them returned to the charity shops from whence they came) so we need to start again.

This all took a really long time and we suddenly realised it was time for a rather late morning snack.  The children were keen to have a book-themed snack, and the only thing I could think of was sandwiches using dinosaur cutters.  So we collected up our Harry and the Dinosaurs books, and they made dinosaur-shaped jam sandwiches and had a drink of milk in their dinosaur cups.  While they were eating, I read “Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs” to them.  When Tiddler came back from Musicbox, he was keen to join in and the others were not happy with him spoiling their displays.  I read one of the Thomas books to him, carefully replaced it in exactly the right position, and then did my best to keep him out of the way while the big three finished the displays and read some of the books.

In the afternoon, the children spent some more time reading and playing by themselves, then we did some messy play together with water beads and ice, which I will blog separately.  They then watched some DVDS (Kids Praise Party and Friends and Heroes) while we were waiting for daddy to come home with pizza for supper.  He was a bit later than expected, and I thought the television had been on for long enough, so I offered to read to them instead.  We read “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Book?” by Lauren Child, which is very funny and clever – highly recommended!  We enjoyed our book day so much, and have so many ideas for what else we could do, that I think we might do it every Friday.