Virtual Book Club for Kids: The Amazing Pig by Paul Galdone

It is time for the Virtual Book Club for Kids!! This month the featured author is Paul Galdone. Since so many of his books are classic tales, I considered doing Cinderella and counting it as my Fairy Tales in Different Cultures, but to be very honest, I couldn't think of a fun craft or activity to do that we haven't already done with some form of Cinderella. So we decided to feature The Amazing Pig.

Preparing for National Hunger Action Month

September is National Hunger Action Month. This year I thought I would get a head start. I am joining the amazing group of bloggers again called Moms Fighting Hunger. We are joining with No Kid Hungry to try to help combat childhood hunger in our local areas. Last year I challenged you my readers to join me in gathering food for local food pantries. Again I will extend this invitation to you. Last year I also helped plan a story time food drive at my local library, but since I got started late, it was in October. We used the theme of Stone Soup for it. This year I am starting earlier. I passed on Jen's from The Good Long Road idea of a food drive themed around The Very Hungry Caterpillar back in the spring, and we discussed doing a story time theme, but it hasn't happened. We are now thinking of doing some combination with the library's food drive around Thanksgiving. 

This year I wanted to do something bigger too. So I decided to gather emails for many local libraries and preschools and offer them the story time themes of Stone Soup and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I gathered craft ideas and story telling ideas for both on Pintetest boards: The Very Hungry Caterpillar Board and Stone Soup Board. I also put together outlines for both story times with options of additional books, story telling props and crafts and activities. (You can click picture or caption to get the free downloads.)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Set

I also did a generic flyer to advertise the story time with spots to fill in each places information (in red). The flyer is in Word, so it would be easy to change.  Here is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. A big thank you to Vickie from Mrs. Plant's Press and Chelsey from Buggy and Buddy for allowing me to use their pictures on my outline.

Stone Soup Set

For Stone Soup, I used pictures from our story time last year on the outline and including a tutorial on making the story stones we used. Then I made a generic flyer again for this story time theme. Finally I made a set of memory cards to go with Stone Soup. The ones I printed, I forgot to center the page so you could print double, but I have fixed it in the printable.

I figured it would be a fun activity and also an easy take-home activity. I have not found as much on Stone Soup as I did The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so I wanted to add some more to it.

I then sent these as attachments to the local libraries and preschools. Above is the e-mail I sent out. I am sharing all of these in hopes that others will want to use them. Either to send out to local libraries in your area or to plan your own story time food drive. 

The next thing we are doing for Hunger Action Month includes our long talked about butterfly party. Hazel made up a Butterfly party song she sang at the library yesterday while playing her ukulele. Sorry I couldn't figure out how to turn the picture with the software it was in. We sent out our invitation to the party asking people to bring fruit for a fruit salad and a can of fruit or vegetable for the local food pantry.

I included the video in the invitation and somehow my clip art did not show up. Oh, well. Hazel is so excited for it. I will post more as we get towards it.

So that is what we are doing for Hunger Action Month. Will you join us and get the word out to help our hungry children? After all, one in five American children are from a family who struggles to get enough food on the table. In a country as great as the United States, I think we can do better for our children.

Math Lesson: Number Importance & Number Sense

Today I am sharing two books with you. We have been enjoying each of them and one will teach why numbers are important and the other will help teach about twelve as well as dividing. I made up simple worksheets to go with both books.

Our first book is Missing Math: A Number Mystery by Loreen Leedy. This book is a wonderful story (one of Hazel's favorites) about a town where all the numbers disappear. Throughout the book there are vocabulary words like numberless, infinity, and more. The words are used in the story but then are defined in another spot on the same page. I put a place to define each word on my worksheet as well as think about where numbers are used in a child's own life. The book gives many examples like birthdays, time, dates, sizes and many more! You can click here to get your own copy of the worksheet.

Our second book is A Dozen Cousins: Exploring the Number 12 by Marcia S. Freeman. This book discusses the word dozen and its meaning. It has plenty of places to practice counting up to 12 as well. It also goes into dividing a dozen into equal groups. It also introduces the reason 12 is important to us--the number of full moons in a year and thus the number of months. For this book's worksheet I suggest giving the child 12 objects (we used marbles) to have them work some calculations out. You can get the worksheet here.

We went through the activities with marbles and I took pictures of Hazel dividing them into groups but did not take pictures of the subtracting. For the dividing I suggested counting out the number of groups we wanted and adding one to each group until she ran out.

I hope you enjoyed today's math lesson!! The next one will be for older kids and especially for the ones who do not like math.

VBCfK: The Rain Came Down

Here is a quick educational activity to go along with David Shannon's book, The Rain Came Down. David Shannon is the author of the month for the Virtual Book Club for Kids. Last week we shared a simple activity to go with Duck on a Bike.

Easter and Spring Match Games & More!

Today I thought I would share some Easter and spring games I made up with free printables. The first is a sequence game of the Easter story.

Easter Decorations and Easter Books

As we are having the third weekend in a row with snow predicted, I am really longing for spring. I pulled out our Easter decorations. I know we will make some new ones this year as well, but at least for now it feels like spring in our house. I also made two garlands which I will share with you at the bottom. This past week was school vacation week, so Hazel and I headed to Cape Cod to visit my parents. There I went to one of my favorite stores, The Priory, and bought some new books for Easter and Lent. I will share them here as well.

Princess Party Food & Free Printable Signs

My Superhero Princess

So yesterday I shared some pictures from Hazel's Princess Birthday Party. Today Hazel enjoyed several of her gifts. She ran around in her new tutu, cape and waving her wand plus a crown from the party and a bag with her bell in it yelling "Here comes Superhero Princess." She rang the bell to let people know she was coming. So much fun!! (She also dressed herself today and her outfit showed it. Nothing matched, oh, well!)

 Today I am going to share our Royal Menu with you. (Well besides the cakes since I shared them yesterday--well I'll share some pictures and then you can check out how to make them and recipes, etc. in yesterday's post.)

We also bought some cold cut platters and roll platters to make the party a bit easier for me. Of course we have lots left over so we will be eating sandwiches for quite awhile. As for the rest of our food and beverages we did a princess theme. And I made signs to go along with them and shared information about the princess and/or princess story. All the information came from wikipedia unless otherwise stated on the cards. And yes, I saved the signs as pdf's so I could share them with you. I made them on Print Shop as quarter fold cards, so  the real-life princesses' information was continued on the inside of the card.

Front of Beverage Cards

For beverages, we had Princess Belle's Tea (sorry I seemed to miss taking a picture of it), Princess Aurora's Coffee, Snow White's Apple Cider, Princess Ariel's Spring Water and some Pink Princess Punch (sparkling and non-sparkling). (Note: Click on each link to get that sign for yourself.) Sorry I didn't save the Pink Princess Punch sign since I did it quickly the day of the party.

Back of Beverage Cards

For appetizers/snacks we had some vegetables and Princess Kalina of Bulgaria's roasted garlic dip (Princess Kalina is a vegetarian) and Princess Jasmine's and Queen Raina's hummus.

Then we had Princess Letizia's Chips and Salsa and crackers with three types of cheese (and yes, I picked the cheese by where there are princesses). We had Princess Mafalda of Savoy's Toscano Cheese, Princess Diana's Cheddar Cheese (I used Diana since Kate is not officially a princess),  and Princess Maxima of the Netherlands Gouda Cheese.

Then to go with the sandwiches we had Princess and the Pea's Vegetable Soup (vegetarian). I based the soup from a recipe from one of my mother's cookbooks by Jane Brody. I'm pretty sure it is Jane Brody's Good Food Cook Book. My mother has had it forever and always uses it. The recipe was simple and I did it in my slow cooker. I just chopped some onions and celery. Added some Italian seasoning and vegetable broth. A can of diced tomatoes and then lots of frozen vegetables. I included frozen diced potatoes in case there were any vegetarians. I wanted it to be filling. Plus of course I made sure to include some peas. Then I poured more broth on and added some ground pepper a small amount of salt (since I use low sodium everything). Everyone who tried it loved it and raved about it.

I was going to make Rapunzel's Chicken and Broccoli Braid, but ran out of time. We will have to have it another time since I have the ingredients to make two of them. I was going to use this recipe at Taste of Home.

So that is our princess themed royal party menu. What do you think? We had fun and have plenty of delicious leftovers. Unfortunately, my father got a cold (either from me or my nephew at Christmas) and they will not be visiting for Hazel's actual birthday, so we are going to have to eat the leftovers ourselves. Hopefully he will get better soon.

Focus on the Nativity

This year one of my goals is to really focus on the true meaning of Christmas. I feel our society is so much turned away from the religious side of Christmas and more into the commercialism and the receiving. I do not want to bring Hazel up this way. I want her to understand why we celebrate Christmas and why it is a special day. So I have been on the look-out for ways to do this. 

Sharing Saturday #7 and free printable

I bought these frames at Michaels for $1 each and did some prints with Christmas Carol verses in Print Shop. Here is the page I came up with (there are some I didn't use).

Welcoming Fall Free Printables!

I have been working on some autumn decorations and of course with fall comes Halloween. Hazel and I made some frames and I printed some autumn quotes to put in them. We will mail them to our family (my family lives in three states and the closest to us is 2 hours away). I taped the sayings in so they can easily be replaced with a picture if the person we give it to would like.

Supplies for one frame

I found these wooden frames on clearance at Michaels for 49 cents! I had some "silk" leaves and we just modpodged them on to it. Hazel found this very easy to do.

For some of the others we painted them (Hazel loves painting) in fall colors. I only gave her yellow, orange, red and brown paints. Then we stuck fall stickers on them. We had some with sayings and some foam ones. We tried a few without paint, but the painted ones came out much better.

The final frame we did was a larger one which was $1 at Michaels. I had bought this before I found the ones on Clearance. We modpodged tissue paper squares on to it then after it dries put on a sealing coat of ModPodge. After it dried we added some stickers.

Supplies for tissue paper frame

Finished tissue paper frame

Painted with stickers

Leaf frame with yarn apple in front

Yarn pumpkin

As you can see I also have made some yarn apples and pumpkins from Make and Takes blog. And I made some banners. I made a Happy Autumn one with witch hats on the back. (I'm hoping to share these with you once I figure out how to post a pdf file here.) If you do make this, remember to do the back in reverse. I made this mistake late last night and had to fix it this morning.

Trick or Treat Witch Hats

Trick or Treat Ghost Banner

Finally I did a trick-or-treat ghost banner like paper dolls we use to cut out. Again, once I figure out the pdf files on here, I will provide you with the banners and the autumn phrases.

So begins my fall decorating. Enjoy your weekend!!
I think I figured it out. Let me know if this works or doesn't!
Autumn Phrases  Welcome Autumn Banner
Witch Hat Banner  Ghost Banner