Ingredients

Instructions


1. Take a deep breath, stop snapping at the child and offer them the chance to cook a magical feast alongside you.
2. Set up a surface (near your kitchen work surface) with one copy of Doodle Cook by Herve Tullet and a pot of your child’s favourite drawing tools.
3. Start cooking together! You follow whatever recipe you’re doing, your child follows her own. You chat, you laugh, delicious plates of food get created and everyone is MUCH happier than before!

Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking with my kids, but sometimes it’s easier to have them alongside in the kitchen without actually chopping, mixing, and spreading mess everywhere. So when I saw that the creator of one of my favourite picture books of 2011, Press Here (my review is here), had created an activity book all about doodling, creativity and food I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

Like so many of Tullet’s books, the idea here is very simple. Tullet presents a series of recipes, calling on the “chef” to add a sprinkling of squiggles, a pinch of blobs, a dash of zigzags and so on to create a whole feast of illustrated dishes. There’s Triangle Cake, Sun-Ray Tart, Thousand-layer Cake, Dot Stew and Nameless Soup, to give you just a flavour of what’s on offer.

A sample recipe from Doodle Cook

The book is sturdily produced and printed on really heavy paper, making it robust and ideal for wild doodling and strong enough to hold up to watery painting too. My only minor gripe would be that I would like to see it published with a ring binding so that it is easy for kids to make the pages lie completely flat. It’s hard for small hands to bend the spine thoroughly enough to make sure pages stay open.

I’m a huge fan of activity books both as life savers for busy parents but also as sneaky sources of reading when kids are reluctant to pick up a book (I wrote more about this last summer over at Wahm-Bam). The best activity books will inspire kids to continue being creative when they’ve filled up the book: with Doodle Cook we had fun coming up with our own doodle recipes, even having a sort of recipe draw-off around the lunch table one day.

All in all, Doodle Cook is perfect to give the kids whilst you’re preparing supper or if you wish to encourage your young artist or chef to think outside the box (or should that be ‘off the plate’?).

Whilst we both cooked we listened to:

Polly Wolly Doodle (get it? ) – here are fun versions by Johnny Bregar, The Biscuit Brothers, and The Hollow Trees.

Doodle Cook also made me think of these nice things:

Have you and your kids used any activity books recently? What do you look for in a great activity book?
And, please, if you’re a (fairly) regular reader of the blog and haven’t left a comment on my New Year’s Post, please head on over there and do so!

Disclosure: I received my copy of this book from the publisher. This review, however, remains my own and honest opinion.

With all the elements of a fairy tale (an enchanted wood, a trapped heroine, a terrifying giant, a sprinkling of magic, kindness from animals and a love story) Pushka is a story to capture the imagination. There’s just the right amount of adrenalin and fear (Will the giant get his way? Will Lulu, the giant’s harp-playing ballerina of a puppet be able to escape?), made bearable by the beauty and wonder of the setting and a joke or two to relieve the tension (Pushka is, after all, a circus clown).

The illustrations have a dream-like quality about them with lots of soft-focus, pastel tones. The story is great fun to read aloud, with opportunities to make silly noises, to sing, and to growl. The storytelling itself has quite a cinematic feel; the events unfold in the present tense, and the pacing of the story times points of tension with page turns to perfection.

In fact, it turns out that Stephen Mackey has created an animation of Pushka which you can watch here. It isn’t identical to the book (and I don’t know which was created first), but both formats share a lot of elegance, charm and magic.

Hopefully the animation will inspire you to seek out the book. It’s an enchanting fairy story told with pace, simplicity and grace.

So here’s how M and J turned Pushka into their play. Of course there were billboards advertising the show:

Tickets and programmes were printed to sell:

We had to create a water squirting flower for Pushka to use to try to dampen the fire. We used this tutorial as our guide:

Here’s our finished flower (it worked amazingly well!):

The stage was set with trees made from huge cardboard rolls (Thanks Grandpa!) with paper cone branches taped on. Plenty of sparkly lights and glittery snowflakes (instead of the stars in the book) completed the scene with just the right hint of wintery-ness.

We used a brio train to represent the circus caravan:

Casting was made a little more complicated by the fact that both girls wanted to be Lulu. This was solved by having an intermission half way through the play when they swapped roles and costumes.

I played the mean old giant, and we took the curtain call all together.

We prepared a soundtrack for our play:

Other activities which would be fun to try alongside reading Pushka include:

Did you or your kids put on a show over Christmas? Did you go to see a show as a family?
Oh, and if you’re a (fairly) regular reader of the blog and haven’t left a comment on yesterday’s post, please head on over there and do so!

Disclosure: I received my copy of this book from the publisher. This review, however, remains my own and honest opinion.

Source: bookmaniac.org

Last Friday I reviewed Eleanor’s Secret, a film all about learning to read, a love of stories, and favourite storybook characters coming to life. It’s currently one of the kids’ favourite films, but it has also inspired lots of play and conversation – which characters do we wish could step out of their books to join us for a day, for a picnic, for a dance?

These conversations led to us watching all the animations from the post earlier this week and also in us making our own books with some favourite characters who could step out from the pages and join us in real life.

We decorated blank book boxes (ours came from online craft shop Baker Ross) but you could make your own book boxes if you had more time – here are tutorials from Wish Wish Wish (using a real book) and Design Sponge (making a blank from cardboard).

A Pretty Book is a great place for getting ideas for what beautiful books can look like!

Then the girls told me which characters they’d like to come alive from books they enjoy. M wanted Flower Fairies and the cast of the Alison Uttley books about Little Grey Rabbit to pop out of their books. J wanted the inhabitants of Richard Scarry’s Busytown to come to life. So next step was to visit a second hand bookshop and see if we could find an old copy of these books to magically bring to life.

“Magically bring to life” is perhaps slightly misleading as what we actually did is… cut the books up. We cut out the characters we liked, glued them on to cardboard, painted the back of the cardboard just to make things a little prettier, and then when all was dry we cut out our 3-D characters.

Little Grey Rabbit, the Geranium Fairy, the Cat Family and Mr Fixit were soon jumping out of the girls’ books and setting off on adventures of their own around our house and garden.

Music we enjoyed while bringing our characters to life included:

For more images of harmed yet beautiful books take a look at these:

So which camp are you in? Do your books remain pristine? Do your books get manhandled to death? Personally I like my books to show they’ve been read – I love finding little comments from previous readings, and dog ears remind me of earlier times of enjoyment. For me, signs of being handled and read show that the books have a life of their own. But what about you? How do you handle your books?