On the 12th August 2014 I took charge  of a Blyton themed event in the library where I work, for the children.

I had a word with the Children’s Librarian a few months ago about running a Blyton themed event, probably based on the Famous Five, and she agreed happily.

We chose a date in the summer holidays the 12th August to be exact, the day after Blyton’s birthday on the 11th August. So in a way it was a birthday party.

The picture of the Five with the name tags on.

I got everything ready before hand, using parcel tags to create a treasure hunt. The children had to collect all the tags and work out the phrase I had created from them. Later on, I shall tell you what this phrase was.

So I began with introducing the children (I only had two) to the Famous Five. To do this I printed out a picture of the Five, one of the 1996 TV cast. I asked the children to name the Five, and I blu-tacked name tags onto the picture to make it clear.

Then, I invited the children to join us on a picnic and they were given a paper plate and asked to draw some lovely food that they would take on a picnic with the Five.

I made the session, which was an hour long, into a mini-story to string all my crafts together, and get the children involved.

When they had finished decorating their picnic plates, I ad-libbed a story where George and Julian had a row and George stormed off with Timmy, like in Five Go Off to Camp and said that George had been kidnapped, and would we help Julian, Dick and Anne find her?

The parcel tag clue!

To do this involved parcel tags that I mentioned earlier, which I had placed them around the library the day before. There were quite a lot of letters for them to find, but they did really well, only missing one letter, which I hadn’t realised until they were laying out all the letters to make the phrase up.

The children really enjoyed this part of the hour, as they were up and about, and collected all the letters successfully (bar one which had got unluckily hidden behind some books).

Then with a helpful map on the table, the children and myself began to work out the clue! Now it wasn’t that hard for us seasoned Blytonites, but for children it was pretty difficult; it was a LOT of letters but soon they found out that the phrase and the clue to where George was being hidden was the Kirrin Island dungeon!

So off we went to rescue George, and soon the Five were back together again and to celebrate I asked them to collage a line picture of Timmy to take him with them. This they enjoyed as well. I think I had quite a band of happy children when they left.

Still, it was a shame that there were only two children, but it will be interesting when I get to do it again, if it is more popular!

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed my description of my Enid Blyton event, and please do let me know if you have hosted similar things, or have any ideas on what I could do next time!

Some of the crafts, and the books I got together for the event.