The Lonely Beast

Here are all the wonderful, fun and educational activities from our May activity box, inspired by the action-packed story The Lonely Beast written by Chris Judge.

These simple but fun activities are perfect to teach our children about determination, resilience, adventures and start those conversations about loneliness. We hope you and your little ones have lots of fun helping the Lonely Beast to find some friends!

Clay beast

Clay is not something we use very often but it’s such a great tool to be creative with. We really enjoyed going into the garden to collect different natural objects to see what imprints they would make in the clay. We also raided our spice cupboard and star anise make a wonderful shape in the clay.

My son really enjoyed seeing what patterns and pictures he could create and we used that knowledge to make lots of Lonely Beasts. We still have clay left and we are planning on making some fish to add to our sea small world.

under the sea small world

I had originally planned on setting the small world up myself ready for the girls to play with but F had very different ideas! She was very keen to help! So together we poured the coloured sensory rice into the box. Then we ripped the green tissue paper that comes with our May subscription box. Next, we added the wooden sea shapes and the fish crayon. Finally, it was time to add our lonely beast clay figures that we had already made.

We began by acting out the story, using the sea small world to retell what happened and using the book to remind us. Then before long F had her own ideas of what would happen in her sea small world! The beast and the mermaid became best friends and then F enjoyed zooming the fish around making marks in the rice. This is a really easy but fun small world activity that will support retelling the story and language development!

Baking scones

One of the Lonely Beasts favourite thing to do is to bake and eat cake. These scones are a wonderfully simple baking activity to try with kids and also taste great. We send the dry ingredients, you will just need to add some butter and milk. I left my husband and my son in charge of this as the activity card explained exactly what they had to do. They both enjoyed baking together and of course eating them with cream and jam. The chocolate chips scones were definitely the favourite.

cornflowers

For this simple kids gardening activity, we send the compost pellet and the cornflower seeds. My son is now a pro with how to grow the compost pellet and adding the seeds in. Our cornflowers are starting to peek through the compost and my son has been so excited to watch their progress. We can’t wait to see the flowers.

Letter search

This phonics activity is an additional idea inspired by the Lonely Beast and uses the cardboard box and the blue under the sea sensory rice. My son has been focusing on the single letter sounds at preschool, so these were the ones we chose. If your child is older you could use this activity to find tricky words that can not be sounded out easily. For example the, no, she, they.

I wrote the letter sounds we were focusing on the cardboard, placed that in the tray and poured the rice on top. I added a paintbrush to move the rice around but this is not necessary. Together we searched for the letters and together we hunted for the letter in the book and practised sounding out that letter.

over the mountains

In the story the Lonely Beast, the lonely Beast travels over the mountains to find friends. This small world activity enabled my son and I to reenact this part of the story. I cut out some triangles from a cardboard box and added the white playdough from our Polar Bear box. Together with my son, we added the white playdough to the different parts of the mountains, built the mountain range up and then ran our clay beast up and down the mountains.

at the beach

After climbing over the mountains, the Lonely Beast reaches the sea. This activity recreates that part of the story. For this activity, I used the blue sensory rice, the yellow playdough from our The Last Chip box, the wooden shapes from this box, shells that we have collected from various trips to the beach and our clay beast.

welcome home

This is our favourite part of the story; it is when the Lonely Beast arrives home and other Beasts are waiting for him to welcome him home.

This activity uses resources we have sent in previous boxes: the glass pebbles (balloons) are from the Colour Monster, the wood slices from our Last Tree in the City box, the white bird and paper flowers from our Sunflower shoots and Muddy boots box, the felt leaves from our Leap Frog box and the green sensory rice is from our Christmas box.

Writing Recipes

This literacy activity is perfect for older kids who are exploring writing. Writing down our scones recipe is the perfect opportunity to do some writing as M had experienced actually making the scones herself she already knew the steps involved and the ingredients we used too.

This meant she could just concentrate on the process of writing it down. This activity also works with younger children as an opportunity for purposeful mark-making. They can afterwards tell you what they have written. They can see that their writing has purpose and meaning.

This is an important early step as a writer. I am looking forward to sharing some more cooking with M and then writing the recipes down so that she can build her own collection of recipes that she can use! If you would like a copy of the recipe template send us an email and we will send it to you! hello@littlehandslearning.co.uk