So I’m having to get my colour fix another way, and one source of rainbow delight this last couple of weeks has been Flyaway Katie by Polly Dunbar.

Katie is feeling grey. Finding inspiration from a beautiful picture on her wall of birds with colourful plummage she sets about trying to cheer herself up. First she puts on her most colourful clothes, and although that helps she doesn’t yet feel quite right. So, Katie then paints herself – her face, her arms, her fingers, and whilst the paint is drying magic occurs.

With a fizz and a flutter Katie is ably to fly into the picture on her wall and spends the rest of the day living in colour, making friends with the cheerful, exotic birds around her, having a great deal of fun right up until it is time to return home for her bedtime bath.

Both girls (and me!) love this book. The illustrations are a tonic – Dunbar’s use of colour is most definitely what the doctor ordered for us. Stars and sparkles fizz over the pages and the birds’ feathers come in a riot of colours. Katie’s imagination and can-do attitude, as well as her body language and fashion choices remind me somewhat of Lola (as in Charlie and Lola) – a great little hero to identify with. Although a short read, it carries a great message worth reminding ourselves of sometimes – with a bit of creativity we can do a lot to help cheer ourselves up! No more complaining about the weather and the cold then for me

As soon as we’d read the book for the first time, M and I both wanted to do exactly as Katie had done – find our best, brightest, cheeriest clothes and fly away into a magical place. So the first thing we did was to recreate a picture to hang on our kitchen wall in hommage to Katie’s picture. I cut out bird shapes from card and “feathers” from multi coloured tissue paper and we all sat down as a family to stick, glue, and decorate our birds.

The final result has certainly brightened up our kitchen!

One friend saw this yesterday and commented “Hmm, not a lot of parental involvement there, then!” – but that was missing the point entirely I think – this was a great project that got all four of us sat together around the table, pottering away on our birds, helping each other, chatting, working together. The process of making the picture was more important than the final result, but of course I can’t capture that in any way.

Anyway, once we had our picture ready to jump into, next we had to make ourselves some wings. For each girl I took two strips of card about 5 cm wide and as long as the distance from armpit to wrist for each girl. I folded the card over and then glued into the crease lots of large tissue paper feathers (each about 20 cm long).

When all the feathers were in place I folded over the top piece of card and stapled it down. As soon as the glue was dry I used safety pins to attach the wings to my own little birds, and then we starting flying about!

We definitely had a good time, and felt much brighter and happier for a dash of colour, a flight of fancy and a good dance.

Flyaway Katie: *** (3 stars)

We flew and danced to:

I’ll Fly Away on the Down from the Mountain: O Brother, Where Art Thou? album

Colour my World by Petula Clark

Three Little Birds by Bob Marley (bound to cheer you up if you’re having a grey day!)

There are so many more great projects out there that involve lots of colour. Here are two that we’re definitely going to try:

When it stops being so grey and temperatures warm up enough for us to take some clothes off in the garden I’d like to try body painting – here’s a lovely post from The Artful Parent about her experience of this fun sounding activity.

Today I’m linking up with a new project – Feed Me Books Friday, hosted by Janna at The Adventure of Motherhood. If you have 5 minutes to spare do head on over there as there will be plenty of book recommendations from other parents to check out!

So working through the shelves J pulled down Penguin by Polly Dunbar, who we’d come across previously when we read (and enjoyed) Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy. Penguin won the Booktrust Early Years Awards in pre-school category and the silver award in the Nestle Children’s Book Prize for children under five years old in the year it was first published (2007) so all the signs pointed towards us taking this book home and having fun reading it. And that is exactly what we did.

Ben ripped open his present.
Inside was a penguin.
“Hello, Penguin!” said Ben.

“What shall we play?” said Ben.
Penguin said nothing.

Ben tries everything to get his lovely new stuffed toy friend to talk to him – he tickles his penguin, he sings a silly song, he stands on his head. But all to no avail. Ben becomes a little frustrated and pokes fun at Penguin but this also fails to provoke a response. More drastic action is required.

When even firing penguin into outer space doesn’t work, Ben gives up and tries to feed his present to a passing lion. However, the lion doesn’t play ball; he refuses to eat the penguin. Poor Ben is exasperated and finally yells furiously at the penguin and then… something truly terrible happens!

Quite what occurs is best left to enjoy when you read this book, but suffice it to say that this calamitous event finally spurs the penguin into action, catastrophe is averted, and in his own way, Penguin finally does what Ben has wanted all along and all’s well that ends well.

This story, with its twist initially reminiscent of something out of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales, is simply and beautifully told by Polly Dunbar. What I love is that it perfectly captures that childhood belief that your soft toys are “real”, balancing rational fact (as adults we know that these are, after all, inanimate objects) with youthful hope and optimism, the latter being richly rewarded. The illustrations are uncluttered and simple (like the text); the interaction between the characters becomes the focus with virtually no background or visual setting to give away their location. The large expanses of white page surrounding the characters instead ensure the sparse use of colour is particularly effective. So all in all, in this household we all agree that Penguin is most definitely a worthy award winner, and a must-read for families with young children.

Inspired by the eponymous penguin, we set to making our own penguin colony. Here’s how we did it:

1. We gathered:

2. We mixed up some black paint with PVA glue and then used the potato to make black blobs all over the sheet of card.

3. Before the black glue/paint mix dried we stuck the white roundish paper on to the black potato prints to create the penguins’ tummies.

4. Again, before the glue had time to dry we added eyes to each of the penguins….

5. …. and then beaks

6. To complete the penguins we draw some feet and flippers (M insisted on being anatomically incorrect – “MY penguins have *long* legs”).

We used pencils rather than pens because when the pencil tips got a bit of paint/glue on them it was easier to wipe off than if we had used felt tips.

7. The penguin landscape was covered in snowy cotton wool, stuck down with some more PVA glue.

Admittedly I prepared the tummies and beaks in advance, but even so, this was still a quick and easy craft with instant results. Originally I had wanted to use potatoes to print all parts of the penguins, but I realised that the girls would get very bored waiting for the paint to dry before printing the next part of the penguin (which would have been necessary for the paint not to mix and turn everything black). I think individual penguins could work well as christmas cards, especially if you added a couple of silver stars or a bit of glitter. Alternatively you could use brown paint and red tummies and make robins.

Penguin: (We bought our own copy this week for £1.99 from The Works)

Whilst making the penguins we’ve been listening to Happy Feet’s soundtrack and the totally raucous but and fun Antarctica by The Dreadnoughts. Other penguin inspired activities we’ve noted for future crafty sessions include:

Finally, we’d love to hear what books, songs and crafts about penguins you and your kids love…so over to you now!

Whilst it was still pouring (but in the spirit of positive thinking) we made some super strength bubble mixture using this recipe:

1/2 cup of concentrated washing up liquid
5 cups water
2 tablespoons glycerine (available at the pharmacy or supermarket)

We mixed the ingredients together slowly, trying to not create any bubbles whilst we did so and then we left the mixture overnight to settle. I don’t know quite what difference this makes, but any recipe you find for homemade bubbles along these lines says that the final mixture will work better if you leave it. So leave it we did (much to the annoyance of M who wanted to use it straight away, of course).

The next day the sun was indeed shining (hooray!) and so we prepared our bubble blowing equipment – a butterfly net and large plastic racket from Poundland, divested of their netting/strings to leave just the frames, the idea being that we would use these as jumbo versions of the small sticks usually found inside bottles of bubble mixture.

To complete the picture, out came our bubble machine (with regular shop bought bubble mixture – I’ve read that home made stuff will clog up the mechanism, and didn’t want to risk it) and -Voila! – our garden was transformed into a shimmering bubble fest to the delight of us all.

When we’d had our fill of bouncing around the garden bursting the smaller bubbles, and trying to make mega bubbles we caught our breath back on the sofa inside with Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy and Polly Dunbar, a wonderful poem/story in rhyme warning of the perils of playing with bubbles…

One day little Mabel is blowing bubbles when her baby brother gets caught inside one and blown away, over the town, higher and higher into the sky. Although the baby quite enjoys the experience (“The baby didn’t quibble. He began to smile and dribble,/ For he liked the wibble-wobble of the bubble in the air.“) his sister, her family and gradually all the townsfolk he floats past are indeed concerned about his fate. Determined to save her brother, Mabel climbs on the shoulders of the other children but just as she reaches out the villain of the story, Abel, shoots at the bubble with his sling and suddenly the future does not look so bright for the boy in the bubble…

Margaret Mahy’s poem is *so* much fun to read, with a great rhythm and clever use of alliteration and rhyme. The vocabulary is more challenging than that used in many books aimed at young children, including words like “cavil”, “cavorting” and “nefarious”) but I found my 4 year old was curious about these strange and special words, the fact that they are unusual only adding to the magic of the story. My 1 year old also enjoyed the poem a great deal even if the vocabulary was clearly way beyond her – the great musicality of the text carries reader and listener along with ease.

(In the spirit of honest parenthood I ought to put one small warning out there, perhaps: if you’re reading this lovely book when you’ve just been woken up at first light by a child who is not interested in the meaning of sleep and you haven’t yet had a coffee many of the lines could double as tongue twisters that may prove a challenge until you’re up and running!)

Polly Dunbar’s illustrations are cheerful and bright and have succeeded in making M wish she could blow a bubble around her little sister! Interestingly, another version of Bubble Trouble is available illustrated by Tony Ross, but we haven’t yet had a chance to look at it to see how it compares.

When the rain returned the next day we attempted to continue the bubble mayhem indoors by making our own bubble bath solution. We used this recipe (sorry – I haven’t kept a note of where it came from):

1 cup Soap Flakes
1 cup Water
2 – 3 tbsp Glycerin
1 drop Essential Oil / Fragrance Oil (although we actually left this out)

But… it didn’t work at all well. Although there were some bubbles in the water as I agitated it whilst the taps ran, by the time the bath was full and the girls got in, there were barely any bubbles left and instead the water looked like it had a horrible scum floating on the top (and I swear this is nothing to do with my (*ahem*) skills at cleaning the bath )

To rescue the situation we added some colour and magic crackles, but today we’ve given in and gone to Boots to buy a commercial brand of bubble bath! (If anyone knows a recipe for home made bubble bath that does work, please let me know!)

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Bubble Trouble:

Our soundtrack these past few days has included Paul Simon’s Boy in the Bubble and on the piano I’ve stumbled through “I’m forever blowing bubbles” accompanied on the kazoo and drums by M and I. Next bubble day I’d like to try painting with bubbles like this and like this. I’d also like to try the bubble wands that Monkey Lobster has instructions for (found via the Crafty Crow) – we didn’t have many containers that were big enough to lay our giant wands flat in, and perhaps this problem would be overcome by using Monkey Lobster’s design.