Summer Virtual Book Club July – Audrey Wood Books

Welcome back to The Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids and this month’s Author/s Audrey Wood & Don Wood. These are new to me authors but we have had lots of fun exploring their different books before settling on one of them for our Virtual Book Club Activities this month.

We have chosen The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and The Big Hungry Bear as our book, strawberries is one of the new things that J is eating so it seemed a great option to do.

One of the messages is in the book is about sharing which is especially relevant as we’re going through another phase of MINE and MY wher J is concerned especially if T wants it or needs a cuddle.

Our main activity involved some homemade strawberry flavoured playdough – which we did some making of strawberries with and some cutting practice to share as well as having fun seeing what other models we made.

How to make Strawberry Play dough

I always use the recipe on The Imagination Tree – this time I added 5 drops of Strawberry essential oil to the boiling water before adding it to the other ingredients to flavour it with strawberry. It smells divine and with the red colour as well it’s really authentic.

To make the yellow seeds on the outside of the strawberry we put in some yellow dyed rice (add food colouring to rice in a zip lock bag and shakes – then leave in the bag over night and the yellow will have coated the rice and it will be ready to play with).

I also added some pasta tubs, crayons and a child’s knife to the plate for our play session.

Making the strawberry for sharing

J and I rolled a large ball of the play dough into a strawberry shape (every time you roll it the smell increases so J just wanted to do it more and more each time) and then we had fun adding seeds to our strawberry.

Once we had a strawberry J sat down to cut and share it just like the Mouse in the book. He’s been practicing his knife skills using play dough since we made our hard boiled egg in the spring and we get the knife out every so often to help him but he’s still working on it.

When he had decided he had enough of cutting up and we could all share the strawberry equally I then added some extra’s in to let him play with the strawberry play dough and get creative in his own way – T also joined in and I set up some play dough for her with some pasta shapes (I thought that the uncooked rice maybe a bit small for her at this stage).

They poked and prodded and created different shapes – J is very into crabs at the moment and decided because of the colour that with the pasta in his shape looked like a crab now instead of a strawberry – the pasta tubes were the legs.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be posting some more ideas that we have been playing with around The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and The Big Hungry Bear I hope you will come back and check to see what we have been up to.

This virtual book Club is brought to you by the following Co-hosts – please go and check out the ideas that they have come up with for Audrey and Don Wood books and if you would like to join in (pop by and see the competition that I am running to win your own copy of The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and The Big Hungry Bear today) then please post about it if you have a blog or share picture on our facebook page.

Toddler Approved