This is a Blog hop! Julia Donaldson inspired activities

As you are all aware I love Julia Donaldson books so have joined the blog hop on coffee cups and crayons. Please Link your Julia Donaldson inspired activities. All other activities will be deleted so please stay in the theme thank you :) 

Sharing a book- The Gruffalo Day

On Monday we decided to have a Gruffalo day as part of our sharing books together.  The Gruffalo is a Julia Donaldson Book which has some fantastic illustrations and links into learning about animals as the mouse meets different animals on the journey  through the woods.  The mouse it actually very clever and makes up a character, the Gruffalo to scare off creatures who may eat him.  Whether children as young as Little Boo actually understand this about the story I doubt but older children may do which may lead to conversation about who eats who in the animal world. The Goodreads website score this book 4.3 and many comments on the book give it glowing praise and refer to how the book uses rhyme and repetition effectively. 

Our Gruffalo day was fantastic! I really would encourage any parent to do this or have a Gruffalo inspired party there is a plethora of resources out there to have a really good day.

We started our morning making a Gruffalo Cake.  Whilst playing our latest CD from the library which is the Gruffalo songs

Just the sponge at first as it needed time to cool. We went to the park and recreated the Gruffalo with print outs that I got from Twinkl.  We first had to go on the swings and slides, then settled down on a bench before our walk to read the Gruffalo

I really do not know why I have not thought of taking books with us before on a picnic (probably the thought of carrying them) as Little Boo just sat and listened really well.

Little Boo enjoyed thinking of places where the characters could go and knew what came next in the story better than I did! We were busy finding a tree for the owl, a log pile for the snake then a hole for the fox.  She picked the characters that were needed for each photograph.  We did get some strange looks from people passing which was quite funny. 

"his favourite food is scrambled snake"

When the Gruffalo story was finished it was picnic time we settled down to picnic with all the Gruffalo cut outs and played some games.  First matching the pictures.  Then spotting the missing one and then we played with the finger puppets to tell the story again. 

Matching the pairs

Who is missing?

We also read The Gruffalo again with  the finger puppets.

When we came home we finished making the Gruffalo cake and had this for pudding after tea and it was lovely!

Little Boo keeps saying now that we had a, "Gruffalo Day" hence the name for the post.  I hope that you like this and that the links may be useful for parties or Gruffalo days.

Sharing a book - A squash and a squeeze

Julia Donaldson in my opinion is a wonderful author.  There are so many of her books in our library.  A Squash and a Squeeze is based around a lady who is not happy with her house being too small a wise man then tells her to take in animals then she realises that she was happier with what she used to have .  I feel that the moral of it is to be happy with what you have, kind of like the "grass is greener on the other side" but obviously it is not. 

The book incorporates elements of number recognition up to five so can be effectively used for learning numbers in a fun way.  Interesting to find out was that this was Julia Donaldson's first published picture book in 1993.  Goodreads have given the book 4 and a lot of people have commented on how the book has a good use of rhythm.  When considering the text there are many different size words "tiny for two" "titchy for three" this could make for interesting discussion.

When it came to sharing the story together I thought of some activities related to squashing and squeezing.  I think it is really important that the books can also become a sensory experience and will endeavour to do this more often. I decided  to make sensory balloons (this is something that I have wanted to do for ages) it worked really well.  This would be a great activity for siblings to make the balloons for each other.

This is how to fill the balloon as it took me ages to realise!

Items used to make the sensory balloons

 The items that we used for the balloons were

• Water
• Sequins
• rice (had some that I had dyed)
• gravy granules (make a good crunch noise)
• spiral pasta
• ready brek
• Rice Krispies (again crunchy)
• raisins
• flour
• Golden syrup (My favourite)

I put little face on them with permanent marker to make them more interesting.  All this was done whilst Little Boo was at Nannies with her Daddy that way when she came back it was a complete surprise and she was intrigued what was in them.

Crunch, crunch!

"This one does not crunch Mommy"

Some squashing and squeezing of the balloons.  Then Little Boo said "I want to look  inside, get my scissors Mommy" so we did.

Cutting open the balloon

squeeze to get it all out.

The squashing and squeezing was a great hit! I then wanted to make an activity in which Little Boo could use a sequencing activity having looked at this story stick and realising I had no painting sticks, I had a look around and saw a box file, perfect! this can contain all the images and be used to sequence the images as I put Velcro strip inside.  It was decorated using one of Little Boos contact pictures

Inside the folder Little Boo could stick the images on the Velcro in order.Then peeled them off in the order they left the house

 We have loads of items that we are going to use including our alphabet, numbers, images that are different sizes and colour sorting.  Hope that you have enjoyed this review I wanted to do something a bit "out the box"!