A brilliant way for children to see their favourite stories come to life into the great outdoors, acted out by themselves and other creatures and critters.

Give this one a try ‘The Snail and the Whale’ by Julia Donaldson, being transformed from the page to reality by little hands and little minds. You need very little other than the book itself, your time and the great outdoors. It can of course also be done indoors, but the magic is taking it outside. Start with a scavenger hunt for all the props your children consider relevant to the book. You can give them some direction with this - but half the fun is seeing what they see as meaningful in the tales they love.

As they had chosen the snail and the whale on this day, I gave them a whale from our sea creatures collection to start us off and we set about the garden to collect other items they wanted to include. It turns out that in their view a snail (which we luckily managed to find!), some logs and some leaves were just what was needed. We then set about creating the scene, which is when I brought the book out and we flicked through the pages, picking out certain parts of the story that they wished to recreate. For this one you could try bath toys, the paddling pool and a tuff tray. We then read the story to our snail, who was riding its whale, outside in front of the scene they had created.  Other great recommendations are: The Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛, The Gruffalo and The Koala who Could 🐨. Hope you have as much fun as we did!