‘Harry The Dirty Dog’ Fun

I love books, and I love the way that kids can learn from the stories within them, in so many different ways. Therefore I have decided to start doing some ‘book work’ with Alfie, and having a son who loves animals, and is completely obsessed with role play, Gene Zion’s ‘Harry the dirty dog’ seemed like an appropriate book to start with!

After reading the book, we collected as many small toy dogs as we could find, and decided to get them a little dirty from the mud in the garden…

Adding a little water ensured that the dogs got REALLY dirty!

And then it was time for a bath…

This is ‘our dog’ Harry having his bath ….

After this, we decided to make some bone shaped biscuits (yes, it’s true, I just happen to have a bone shaped cookie cutter…)…

The ingredients we used were:

2 1/2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 egg

1/2 cup honey

3/4 cup butter

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1) Mix all the dry ingredients (except sugar) in a bowl

2) Craem butter, sugar and hiney in seperate bowl.

3) Beat egg in to butter mixture.

4) Combine wet and dry ingredients and pound  in to a good dough.

5) Set oven to 180 degrees C / 350 degrees F

6) Roll out dough and cut out bones shapes (or similar!)

7) Place biscuits on greased baking sheet and put in oven for 8 – 10 minutes

Alfie really enjoyed adding and mixing all the ingredients – but I ended up doing most of the cutting with the cookie cutter – by this time he just kept eating the dough!

And while we were waiting for the biscuits to bake, I printed out some dog colouring pictures from the internet, and Alfie enjoyed turning the white dogs in to very dirty dogs, by finger printing with a black ink pad!

I started to do similar book work with Leon and Maya when they were both around Alfie’s age, and they both thoroughly enjoyed it – and judging on today – Alfie did too!

Although (this time) I didn’t use it, a very inspiring website based on these types of book activities, is ‘Playing by the book‘. Check it out  – it’s fantastic!