Bringing some favourite books to life

Looking past the not so fantastic moments from last year, one definitely VERY fantastic thing that happened was kicking-off our reading of chapter books together.

So far we’ve finished reading Enid Blyton’s ‘The Wishing Chair’ and ‘The Wishing Chair Again’, and a little bit of ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’… Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and ‘The BFG’… and we are about halfway through C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’.

I managed to score some extra time off over the school holidays. So I decided to indulge in a bit of bookish fun by bringing some the books we read to life.

We set up our own ‘Willy Wonka Factory’ making our own Wonka bars, everlasting gobstoppers, non-melting ice creams and other confectionery creations. I made some gingerbread ‘bars’ for the kids to decorate and create their own versions of wonka bars, edible play dough for them to mould and shape into various sweet treats, and handfuls of mini M&Ms, Nerds candy and chocolate chips for them to embellish their creations with.

After that, we sat down to illustrate and write out our own secret recipe books for all the various confectionery creations we came up with. We put the booklets together ourselves in the same way we did with our previous book writing activities.

Following ‘The BFG’ we concocted our own dream jars by mixing together some small glow sticks, glitter with a sugar syrup mixture (you can also use glycerin which allows the glitter to float slowly around in the jar rather than sinking too quickly to the bottom of the jar).

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P.S. Can’t wait to read the other books on this list with the kids. Plus four terrific and very touching children’s books worth reading with your little ones, and a marvelous medicine activity I did with Nathan and Grace.