This last week has been all about World Book Day for Toby and Gabe. As well as dressing up for school on Thursday they also had a book swap at school. In the afternoon parents and carers were invited to go in to ‘share a story’ so I went in with my mum to read with the boys.

This year Toby and Gabe’s school asked them to come as a brave character from a book. They had been doing a lot of work in school about being brave and building resilience so they decided to tie World Book Day in with that.

We had a think about the books we had with brave characters in them and immediately thought of one of our favourites – The Lion Inside (affiliate link) by Rachel Bright. If you’ve not read it it’s about a tiny mouse who wants to be more brave so he goes to ask a lion to teach him how to roar.

It’s a lovely book (as are the other books by Rachel Bright) and Gabe was very happy to dress as the mouse. I made him some ears using foam sheets, a hairband and a glue gun. He had a wool tail and a felt tummy sewn on to his top.

Toby had decided he wanted to be a crayon from The Day the Crayons Quit (affiliate link) by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers before we got the letter from school about brave characters. We had a think and realised we could make use of the green leggings and hoody he wore for his Mr Nosey costume in Reception and go as Pea Green crayon from The Day the Crayons Came Home.

Pea Green decides he is going to change his name to Estaban the Magnificent and go off and explore the world, which we thought was a pretty brave thing to to.

I made the main part of Toby’s costume from a green laundry basket. The words and pattern were cut from foam sheets and stuck on with a glue gun and I used green card to make his hat. You can’t quite see it in this picture but he also had a yellow cape which was actual one of our old rainbow muslins just safety pinned onto the back.

Toby loved his costume and we were both very happy when he won a £5 book token for having the best costume in his class! For a boy who has never really liked dressing up he fully embraced it this year and I’m just pleased I managed to make something that looked vaguely like the idea he had in his head for his costume this year.

I loved seeing all the pictures on social media of everyone’s costumes last week – did your children dress up for World Book Day?

This is my ninth year taking part in this linky celebrating childhood, based on a poem by Kahlil Gibran, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth” .

If you’d like to see the rest of my Living Arrows posts you can find them all here.