Today ended up with some rainy day crafts to pass another day indoors and celebrate World Book Day. We began with a bit of sibling competition having racing slinkies.

I love it when my kids can entertain themselves with a toy I remember playing with as a child. Life has moved on, technology has well and truly arrived. It doesn’t mean the children can’t still pass a happy hour having slinky races down the stairs!

There is something satisfyingly reminiscent about the sound of that little metal spiral ‘walking’ its way downstairs. As a child I never knew how much my mother dreaded hearing the phrase “its tangled”.

So after a few successful runs the cry came up. Slinky was truly and completely tangled.

I have untangled many a necklace chain in my time so I was confident at first. After 20 minutes I had to admit it was worse than when I started. Nearly an hour later it was finally free to race again. By then, inevitably, interest had waned. So it was time to put the slinkies back in their boxes.

By lunchtime we had managed rain, sleet, hail, sun and snow). It was an indoor day. Time then to find an indoor activity to entertain us all. For me a rainy day often ends up with trying some rainy day crafts.

World Book Day had just passed, so I thought we could make some new bookmarks. I started by drawing out some simple shapes like rectangles, circles, hearts, pencils and feathers. I then used them as templates to cut out pieces in white card. We used card rather than paper so it would be stronger, especially when painted.

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Then it was over to the kids, we got the water colour paints out and they decorated their shapes. They haven’t used paints for quite a while so they spent ages decorating with all kinds of colours and methods. If you have younger children, less time or a lovely cream carpet then you might prefer to use crayons or felt pens rather than paint.

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Once they had finished we left them to dry. Then we added some more details. Firstly some more colour and writing with pens. Then on some we punched holes in the card and added tassels, elastic and pipe cleaners threaded with beads.

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The kids were really pleased with how their bookmarks turned out – I was quite impressed too!

Now its time to spend our World Book Day vouchers on some new books so we can make good use of our new bookmarks.