Toddler Group Tuesday (on a Thursday) - World Book Day

I know, it's not Tuesday, but you see, I'm sure it was just Tuesday, you know, a blink of an eye ago. Being entirely honest? The days run away from me, but this has kind of worked out for the best this time. You see, today is World Book Day, and the craft we did at Tuesday's session was related to that.

We made bookworms and bookmarks.

For the Bookworm you will need:

- a piece of felt about 6cm square
- a pipe cleaner
- a feather
- some glue
- a small piece of coloured card
- little bits of craft foam or stickers (or even some small google eyes) for features

First of all take our peice of felt and roll it up tightly.

Starting at one end of the felt roll, wrap your pipe cleaner all the way around in a spiral, all the way along. This will hold the roll closed, provide a bit of decoration (especially if you use contrasting colours of felt and pipe cleaner) and make it possible for you to bend your worm into shape.

Bend your felt and pipe cleaner sausage into an 's' shape.

Push your feather into the centre of the end of your felt roll (push it quite deep so that it holds firm. This forms your worm's hair. All the best bookworms have fantastic hair, didn't you know?

Next stick your features on. At toddler group we used foam pieces to make some little black eyes and a pink smiley mouth, but Alexandra made a couple of these last night to take into school today, and she used some little face stickers that we had a whole sheet of.

Last but not least, make sure that your small piece of card is trimmed to just the right size to make a little book for your worm. Fold the card in half, and use the glue to fix it to your worm for reading. You could write a title on your mini book, or you could even cut out the front cover of a book from a book club magazine to stick on.

All finished!

Just the perfect size for tiny little fists :)

The bookmarks we made were really simple: Just a strip of craft foam, about 4cm x 21cm decorated all over with a selection of stickers. The Small Person also made a few bookmarks for her teacher and a couple of friends, and she wrote their names on. You could write the name with letter stickers. A more durable version would be to use card instead of foam and then run it through a laminator if you have access to one.

The Small Person has had to wear green to school today (I have no idea why!) and she is taking part in a readathon over the next 3 weeks, raising money for various charities and 20% will go towards new books for the school. We're in the proccess of signing up sponsors. Tomorrow they are also having a book swap where the children can exchange one old book from home with another child. Alexandra took hers in at the start of the week (so that Mummy wouldn't forget!): Hairy Maclary Rumpus at the Vets. She had two copies of it, so she wont be losing anything at all.

World Book Day is great for encouraging an interest in reading, not just in children, but adults too. Are any of you doing anything to get involved?