Children’s Book Week, May 1-7, 2017
It’s Children’s Book Week again!
This is the 98th anniversary of Children’s Book Week, and the Children’s Book Council, Every Child a Reader, and local bookstores and libraries have lots of events planned! But you can celebrate at home with any of these activities. (A few of these appeared in my 2016 Children’s Week post.)
by Jessie Wilcox Smith
Read a children’s book! (This falls in the “obvious” category. Obviously.)
Read aloud to a child. Your own, your niece or nephew or grandchild, a neighbor. . . Pick one of your own childhood favorites or something more recent and share it. If you don’t have a specific child in mind, see if your local library or school would let you volunteer to read. And if the child you want to read to is far away, try reading over Skype or Facetime, or record yourself reading the book and send them the book and recording.
Borrow an audiobook from the children’s section of your library, and listen to someone reading to you.
Review your favorite children’s book on your blog, Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever else you post reviews.
Have a movie night. There are a lot of wonderful movies based on children’s books, from Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter movies. Rent or stream one and watch it with your family and friends.
Classic Pooh sculptures by ‘Robin’. Photo © K. Pekar
Make fan art! Pick one of your favorite children’s book, and draw or paint a character or scene. Use polymer clay to create sculpures, like the ones above (made for me by my daughter Robin.) Or pick images from the web and create a moodboard, character board, or “aesthetic” collage that suggests your concept of a character, setting, or other aspect of the book.
Do you like to color? There are online coloring pages based on children’s books. Try Hedgie’s Spring Bike Ride (based on Jan Brett’s hedgehog character) or The Very Hungry Caterpillar coloring page, or search for pages based on your favorite book. Or you can buy a coloring book by a well-known children’s book artist, like Graeme Base’s Animalia Coloring Book or Fairies: Paintings by Michael Hague Coloring Book.
Print these Children’s Book Week bookmarks from Every Child a Reader, and use them to mark your place.
Create your own bookmarks based on children’s books. Design them on the computer, or draw or paint them yourself. Make them from cardstock (which you can laminate, if you wish), felt, or fabric.
Make a special food or drink from (or inspired by) a children’s book and recreate it. Green eggs are easy — just add blue food coloring to eggs before you scramble them. For something a bit fancier, here are 31 Recipes Inspired By Children’s Books (Food.com.) And just for fun, try these recipes for Butterbeer collected by the blogger of Wizarding World Park (not affiliated with the theme park.)
If you’re really ambitious, write and/or illustrate your own children’s book!
Angela
Lots of great ideas to get kids excited about reading! It would be fun to read some books together and then have a movie night inspired by those books and maybe even have some snacks to go along with it!
Angela recently posted…Why Book Blogging is a Good Fit For Shy People
Lark_Bookwyrm
That would be fun! Alas, most of the kids in my life have grown up. 🙂