Who knew an egg box could occupy children just as much as its modern day nemesis the Xbox this half term! Thanks to Storyhouse's children's literature festival - affectionately known as WayWord - this week has been like one great big imagination, get-off-your-screens, holiday reading, recycling, culture for kids campaign...all wrapped up with a whole lot of sellotape! Kaleidoscopes. Lighthouses. Secret spy cameras. An impromptu giraffe and a whole herd of rhinestone-studded elephants. Allow me to explain. I am one of the cut-and-stickers doing free arts and crafts mornings in libraries across Chester as part of the festival. The library stereotype of hushed whispers and sitting still has been rocked and rattled with the invasion of the Junk-Modelling Box. At work, at home - everyone's been busy collecting. My family's fervent fetish for dairy has been exposed, as we amassed a multitude of milk bottles and enough yoghurt pots to create the leaning tower of Müller Light over the past couple of weeks. But the Chester Family's calcium intake has its uses: not only do we now have healthy, happy bones, the children of Blacon also have some pretty, darn wonderful yoghurt pot shakers! (Admittedly, a side effect of which is that the library carpet now has a sprinkling of escaped and stray lentils.) Recently, people have presented me with the greatest gifts I could've asked for: bin bags of juice boxes and bottles, tubes and tubs. Little did they know, that in doing so, they gave me the building blocks for MI5 toolkits, the inhabitants of the African Savanna, complex feats of engineering and musical instruments which would turn heads in a symphony hall! The characters, themes and imagination of the books surrounding our, ahem, rather chaotic, nay 'abstractly creative' craft table seeped out of their pages and crept into the Junk-Modelling Box too. Kings and queens, detectives and spies walked out of the library this week, their newly borrowed books in tow. X-boxes may be the ones that make the shop windows, but this half term has shown me that children haven't lost their love of egg boxes just yet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMegan Kate Chester Archives
June 2017
Categories
|