Let the Big Wild Rumpus begin!

The Big Wild Rumpus is a national campaign to celebrate the nations love of Where the Wild Things Are – a true children’s book classic that I vividly remember reading as a child, and have rediscovered since having my own children and reading it to them.

As part of the celebrations, you’re encourage to host or join in on the 13th June with a Wild Rumpus party at 11am. The idea is that everyone reads the book out loud together and when Max says ‘let the wild rumpus start’, everyone shouts and stamps and generally goes wild!

My twins love parties (parties = cake) and dressing up, so we’ll definitely be hosting a Wild Rumpus shindig, where I’ll turn us all into wild things! To get your own wild thing face paint, follow the tutorial below..

1. Create a white/off-white background to work on – I used a sponge to apply a thin layer of white facepaint over Ez’s whole face.

2. Paint large yellow circles around each eye and fill them in yellow, then outline in black and add an eyebrow and black eyeballs (perfect for rolling).

3. Colour the nose orange (we mixed orange and pink for ours as Ez was insistent that it needed to be a pinky orange to match one of the wild things in the book), and use a black outline to enlarge the nostrils.

4. Draw on a smile with a single black line that stretches across the mouth and up onto each cheek, and then add some sharp wild thing teeth (perfect for gnashing). We also painted on some extra hair around the hairline (again to match the wild thing Ez liked in the book).

We also made some hanging vines to create a wild thing jungle for our party. This is a very easy craft that the twins really enjoyed getting stuck into (especially the messy painting bit).

1. Completely cover some large pieces of paper with green paint. We used the back of an old roll of wallpaper, and the twins applied the paint using brushes, sponges and their hands. I gave them green, red and yellow paint which they used to create a spectrum of different greens. Leave to dry.
2. Cut out a leaf template from cardboard and then let the kids draw around it on the painted paper. We used two different shapes – a heart-shaped leaf and a longer, thinner leaf.
3. Cut out the leaves with scissors.
4. Staple the leaves onto a long length of ribbon or paper (we used a crepe paper streamer), overlapping them slightly to make the vines look nice and lush!
(I’m sorry that the twins look so stern in the picture above. I think they were a little miffed that we were just taking photographs rather than having our actual Wild Rumpus party.)

If you’re interested in hosting a wild rumpus celebration, there’s a whole host of resources on The Big Wild Rumpus website including tutorials on decorating your event, recipes for food to be served during the rumpus, craft activities to make before and during the party and costume ideas.

Will you go wild for The Big Wild Rumpus?

thebigwildrumpus

Website | The Big Wild Rumpus
Twitter | @_wildrumpus
IG | @_wildrumpus
Hashtag | #thebigwildrumpus

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