The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith and Katz Cowley and published by Scholastic is a hilarious rhyming and fun to read book. It describes the donkey that is spotted as someone is walking down a road.
Activities
Pencil trick
Rhyming words
Write own paragraph
Dressing up
Line dancing
Smell game
Walk in the countryside
Hopping
Walking with 3 legs/obstacle course
Pin the tail on the donkey
Donkey inspired snacks
Donkey fairy cakes
Indoor
The donkey in the story only has one eye so older children could do a pencil trick. Give your child/children two pencils each, get them to hold a pencil in each hand horizontally, close one eye and try and get the pencils to meet. It should be difficult as their perception will be changed with only having one eye open. They can try the other eye too. It should keep them quiet for two mins and they will probably enjoy showing off their new learnt trick to friends and family. There are lots of rhyming words so older children can find these in the book and maybe come up with their own paragraph to add on to the end of the story. Wonky Donkey likes country music so your child/children could dress as a cowboy/girl and do some line dancing. This could also be done outside if the rooms in your house aren't very wide. There are how to line dance videos on the internet that they could follow or they could make up their own dances. A final indoor activity is the smell game. Blindfold your child/children and put some different smells in a cup for them to guess what the smell is. You could include coffee as coffee is mentioned in the story and then other things like soap, cheese, and anything else that gives off a good smell. Older children could write down what they think the smell is whereas younger children could just shout out the answer.
Outdoor
In the story the donkey was spotted as someone was walking down a road so you could go for a walk in the countryside with you child/children and see what they can see on the way. The donkey walks on 3 legs so they could try hopping and see how far they get or if you have more than one child you could tie two of their legs together so they have to walk on 3 legs. If they can walk together too easily then you could set up a bit of an assault course to do which will make things more difficult for them. This could include; climbing over things, jumping over things and changing directions. This is a really good activity to get kids working together. A classic donkey game is pin the tail on the donkey. Draw/paint/colour a donkey on some big paper and hang it on the wall. You then need to make a cardboard tail to stick in the right place on the donkey while blindfolded. When they have stuck the tail on write the child's initials where they stuck it as you pull it off so they know where they put it when it is the next person's turn. The person with the tail in the right place or closest to the right place wins.
Food/Cooking
Donkeys tend to eat straw or hay and then apples and carrots so for a snack time you could do twiglets, apple and carrot as a Wonky Donkey inspired snack. If you wanted to get more creative you could make some donkey fairy cakes. Cover the cakes in grey icing (use black food colouring but only a tiny bit) and then either make or see if you can get hold of some small biscuits for the nose, use raisins or chocolate drops for the eyes and then white candy sticks or tic tacs for the teeth. For ears you could use biscuits split in half but if your child/children is creative they might have some good ideas themselves.
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