Make this Book Wild 

Blog by Laura @ one.wild.family.life

I can honestly say, we have never seen a book quite like this one, it combines nature, creativity and exploration all in one beautiful place. The illustrations alone are absolutely captivating, but combined with the ideas for exploring nature they are magical. The idea of drawing, cutting and getting a book muddy on purpose is something that doesn’t come naturally to many book lovers, but the idea of creating a scrap book style story of your nature based adventures is great fun!

This book will easily provide you with great activities all year round, exploring seasons, weathers and different places you may visit. It’s definitely full of surprises, creative ideas and easy but fun activities to either do collaboratively or individually.

Some of the creative and fun activities we have done include drawing shadow monsters and mud creatures – what I particularly loved was the space to do this in, not just a big blank page with an idea of a suggestion, but beautifully illustrated text, and small but inspirational illustrations to help feed creativity and ideas

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The mixture of ideas means that on beautifully sunny and dry days the book can come outside with you and you can be creative wherever you are, but there are also some really fun pages that can be done indoors while dreaming of the wild! My favourite ones include designing a den, and drawing a map of your favourite outdoor place, while introducing some magical elements like fairy doors and portals to space! The book feels to me like it completely captures the magic of childhood and wonder and gives young people space to create with no predetermined ideas – its completely flexible and encourages big ideas and big explorations.

My son, who is a massive mini beast enthusiast, adores the mini beast racing page – we’ve used it almost every time we have got the book out! Each time he adds a little illustration of the bugs who are racing, and it gives him a fabulous observation opportunity, while also giving him time to bug hunt, and play safely in nature. (So far the snails have always come last! Beaten by both slugs and woodlouse!)

The beauty of this book is that many of the activities can be done with children of many ages and abilities. There is no right and wrong, it’s all about celebrating, observing and enjoying nature and being outside.

We’ve made stained glass windows with beautiful petals, build grass friends, got muddy making mud monsters and looked for tiny beauties to make confetti for our garden faeries. We’re looking forward to painting with nature’s colours by making our own paints, looking for shapes in nature and collecting and drawing shells next time we’re at the beach. The ideas seem endless and magical and I cannot recommend this book enough!

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