With world book day just around the corner, I wanted take opportunity to share some of the costumes I have created over the years, and take a look at a couple of the £1 books that are available. This year world book day is on Thursday 2nd March and is celebrating 20 years of promoting reading in the nations children. As with every year, schools across the UK are joining in, in lots of different ways in previous years I have had lots of fun creating costumes for my girls. Because they never wanted to look the same as anyone else, I could never get away with a shop bought one, but I did find that with a little imagination I could make some inexpensive and unique outfits.

Aliens Love Underpants!!!

A cheap green boys hoody from primark, some green felt scraps for ears and old pair of sunglasses coloured in green and there you have it a pant loving alien!

Fern from Charlottes Web

A checked dress she already had, her red welly boots, a soft toy pig and a plastic spider oh and of course 2 messy plaits!

Cindy-Lou Who – How the Grinch stole Christmas!

That hair! It was all about the hair! To create the hair I used 2 hair doughnuts and then she wore a red dress that she already had and a sparkly Christmas cape that I bought cheap off of eBay!

Dorothy – The Wizard of Oz  (Toto was played by Tilly the Jack Russell cross)

This one was super simple. I bought a cheap blue gingham school summer dress, I made a simple apron out of some fabric that I had already and the red party shoes we already had (yes I know in the book they weren’t red!) dog – models own!

There have been others over the years, such as the butterfly from the very hungry caterpillar. But unfortunately I can’t find my photos of them.

The girls have also done other book day activities such as wrapping a favourite book up and then writing their own blurb, so that their class mates can try and guess which book it is. This is one of the blurbs they wrote.

A heart warming story about a heart breaking illness, and how two weaknesses combined turn into life long friends, they travel to Amsterdam to meet their hero, who changes their point of view completely.

Can you guess which popular book this is?

At Mimi’s preschool are doing world book week so that all children get a chance to take part. They are encouraging them to dress up as a character from a book and also to take in their favourite book to share. Mimi dressed as the ladybird from Eric Carle’s ‘The bad tempered ladybird’,

Originally she was going to be the ladybird from ‘What the ladybird heard’ by Julia Donaldson. But seeing as this little ladybird doesn’t listen or really like having her photo taken, the bad tempered ladybird seemed more fitting!

Her favourite book book at the moment is ‘The dinosaur that pooped a rainbow’ by Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter, and it sounds like it went down well at preschool too – but let’s be honest you can’t really go wrong with dinosaurs and poop when it comes to children!

We are very lucky that we have an amazing local independent book shop here in East Grinstead, so when Mimi got her voucher we headed down there to see what we couldn’t get. As every year the choice of £1 books are fab especially the preschool ones. We got both using Mimi’s voucher for one And paying a £1 for the other.

£1 for a peppa pig book – bargain!

Everyone loves underpants, and we love books for £1!

Mimi loves her new books and we would highly recommend both of them. Other titles avalible for your older readers include a Horrid Henry funny fact file, Butterfly Beach by Jacqueline Wilson, The Famous Five’ s Good Old Timmy and Blob, by the one and only David Williams and lots, lots more. And don’t forget even if you don’t get a voucher you can still by a book and if you get a voucher but don’t fancy any of the special edition books you can use the voucher to get £1 off a book of your choice.

World book day can be hard work for us parents but it is so much fun for our kids and let’s be honest that’s what it’s all about!

And that is why I heart world book day!