Today’s guest post is from a very dear friend who shares a special Matilda Mae bond with me. Ruth and her family also share a love of The Gruffalo and searching for him in each and every deep dark wood. Ruth, your children would love our garden and our Gruffalo Hunt!

Enjoy x

When I was little and growing up in Norfolk I enjoyed playing outside in the garden whatever the weather. I’m from Norfolk so countryside and being outdoors is very important to me and pretty much everyone I knew as a child had a garden big enough to build a den, climb a tree and have adventures in.

As an adult bringing up my own children I now live in London. We don’t have a garden. It does not sit well with me. We have plans to move in the future, perhaps even to Norfolk but until then I don’t want my children to miss out on having outdoor fun.

Of course I take them to the swings but I want their adventures to be more than that. I want them to be like the ‘camping trips’ I used to pretend to go on when I would travel to the very bottom of my Mum’s enormous garden, out of sight from the house and where I could set up my camp for the day. I want them to play outside and use what’s around them, smell fresh air all day and be worn out by the pleasure of it come bed time.

When we visit my Mum Florence could happily play in the garden on her own all day long just as I did and I know she misses that freedom so when we are home I like to build adventure days in all the wonderful parks and open spaces we have here. Some of our adventures can be prescriptive I guess but they are so little right now that I can’t let them just run off, it has to be organised in some way but I like to do things which encourages an outdoor freedom type of play. When Jennie was asking for guest posts about ‘play’ I knew I wanted to write about something outdoorsy, so… We had a Gruffalo Play Day in the woods!

Florence often spies Gruffalo trees and would be very happy to play Gruffalo finding in any woods or park. We often pretend we are looking for the ‘nut that looks good’ or the little brown mouse and we might even see Gruffalo foot prints that let us know he is around. We do however, live fairly close to Thorndon Country Park in Essex and they have a superb Gruffalo Trail so yesterday we popped down to find the actual Gruffalo and his friends in his REAL home!

I don’t know any child who doesn’t like doing the trail as it is intended with a map to show you where to find everyone from the story but we like to try and make it a little different. We read books and play games along the way. Yesterday we even did a bit of messy play! Well, this wouldn’t be a post for Jennie if we didn’t get a bit of messy play in now would it?!

A friend and her little girl came with us as we hit the deep dark wood to run and jump over tree stumps and sit under the leaves to read a favourite story and re-enact it!

We found the mouse and we blew some bubbles for Jennie’s Matilda Mae as we danced around him.

Once we found fox hiding in a tree, we decided it was time for some snacks. I had brought some letter shaped biscuits for us to eat some of the words from the book!

Then it was time to consult the map before going in search of owl who we found in his tree top house, snake who was slithering under some logs, the Gruffalo’s child and then…

Terrible tusks, terrible claws and terrible teeth in terrible jaws! Knobbly knees with turned out toes and a poisonous wart at the end of a nose! Orange eyes, a tongue which is black and purple prickles all over a back!!! It must be…

The Gruffalo! We found him!

We completed the trail which was great but along the way we had lots of fun too! We climbed trees and hid in dens built by bigger children and we played with sticks, racing about with them! I think running around with sticks is Jimmy’s new favourite game – he’s such a boy!

Just playing in the woods! Making up games and having fun!

After finding the Gruffalo we wanted to make sure he couldn’t find US! We didn’t want to leave any foot prints or tracks that would lead him home as we love the Gruffalo but we want him to stay in the woods thank you! So… we made some foot prints and tracks to throw him off our scent!

I took with us some paper plates to squirt paint on, three colours of paint and some paper and then we jumped in! Hands and feet! As we ran about with paint on our feet we soon got bits of leaves and bark stuck to us as well and then it made our prints even more interesting!

The friend who came with me and I laughed that her daughter wasn’t particularly into the feet being painted and dirty aspect but both of mine LOVED it! The ironic thing is that my friend is an artist and teacher and loves that sort of thing herself where as I am a bit wincey with messy play and kept trying to wet wipe everybody clean! Florence would have quite happily taken all her clothes off and rolled around in it if I’d let her… Perhaps I should! (When we’re at my Mum’s and can have a paddling pool on hand to jump in afterwards I think!)

And that was the end of our day. With foot prints and tracks left behind (not really, I rolled them up so we didn’t get in trouble for littering) to deter the Gruffalo from following us and a paint spattered floor of the woods, we made our way, exhausted from fun but happy, to the car to head home. We sang some of the songs from the Gruffalo song book on the way home of course!

What we left behind and singing on the way home!

Fun outside in parks is free, easy and has scope to go in any direction you want it to. We are lucky that we have the ‘Gruffalo Park’ near us but in a less prescriptive way we always look for the Gruffalo, no matter what wood we are in, do you?