Download the Play Academy’s ready-made Fairies thematic unit and you’ll be ready to lead a fun and creative programme of imagination and storytelling with your children.

by Cathy James
Download the Play Academy’s ready-made Fairies thematic unit and you’ll be ready to lead a fun and creative programme of imagination and storytelling with your children.
by Cathy James
Use these easy World Book Day activities and lesson plans with your children.
World Book Day is a celebration of books, stories, and reading that takes place each year in March. In 2025 World Book Day will be on Thursday 6th March.
Many home-educating groups, schools, and early years settings celebrate with book-themed events and invite their children (& parents / staff!) to dress up as their favourite book character.
You can have lots of fun theming a whole day, or a whole week of activities around books.
You can use these ideas for easy World Book Day activities to share the love of reading right across the curriculum.
For the best World Book Day lesson ideas, save time and get our ready-made World Book Day teaching unit from our Play Academy. You’ll get:
Come and join our popular Play Academy community and never have to lesson plan again! Join here and download your first ready-made unit today.
Of course you can read anywhere, but creating a special place to read shows just how wonderful books are. It’s very simple to set up a book nook – all you really need is a place to sit and some books – but adding in some extra special touches can make a little reading den that children love to visit. You can make a book nook…
and add in this 23 reasons to read printable poster to decorate your space!
Use props and loose parts as an invitation for children to re-tell the stories they know.
You can tell stories:
with printable story telling kits
with Fairy Tale fridge magnets
with Story Stones
with storytelling cards
with a story telling tin
with a story maps
with The Very Hungry Caterpillar activities
Try these math activities all about books
Play the Guess Who game and see if you can work out who the book character is
Host a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
or a Gruffalo party
Role play The Three Bears
Bake a Gingerbread Man
Play with a Billy Goats Gruff sensory tub
Go on a Bear Hunt
Play Are You My Mother?
Act out Lost and Found
Play in an Out of the Ocean sensory tub
Make Brown Bear, Brown Bear shadow puppets
Have afternoon tea with Charlie and Lola
Act out the Little Blue Truck
Grown your own beanstalk
Be Captain Hook with these 35+ pirate activities
Be Pippi Longstocking and make a Museum of Turnupstuffing
Be Strega Nona
Be an elf for the shoemaker
Be Ottoline
with printable bookmarks
with The Very Hungry Caterpillar crafts
with Peg Doll puppets
with The Tiger Who Came to Tea finger puppet
Make a Wild Thing mask
With a non-fiction book printable
Combine art and storytelling and make an Incy Wincy book
Take the first line of your favourite tale and write your own ending
Write a story on the wings of a bird
Put yourself in a story with speech bubbles
Fill in the blanks of an easel story
Yes, you can do all the planning yourself if you want to, or you can head straight to our Play Academy and download our ready-made World Book Day unit. That sounds like a better idea!
You’ll get a set of lesson plans all based on books: fiction writing, non-fiction writing, making book nooks, book-themed math activities and arts and crafts. Plus you’ll get fun printables to make your teaching even easier.
Come and join the Play Academy to get this and over 50 more ready-made teaching units, so you can easily teach an engaging and successful program that includes math, literacy, science, art, and more, all year round, year after year.
by Cathy James
This Goldilocks and the Three Bears printable set is perfect for storytelling. You can use these ideas to explore this classic tale through imaginative play, and to develop sequencing skills and math concepts.
by Cathy James
Use these ready-made literacy lesson plans and bring your classroom to life with engaging, hands-on language and storytelling units.
by Cathy James
Looking for a literacy curriculum for your homeschool or school? Let the Play Academy make it easy for you with our specialist curriculum pathways of ready-made thematic units.
by Cathy James
Welcome to our puppet unit lesson plans. Over five days we’re boosting language, storytelling, and creative skills as we make puppets, a set and props to host our own puppet show.
NurtureStore hosts regular themed weeks of creative learning activities, giving you ideas, lesson plans, and printables all year round.
This week our focus is on puppets, which is such a wonderful theme for children to explore. Puppets are so versatile: they can be made from almost anything and used to develop many skills and interests.