Sharing Saturday 14-40

Between meetings at church on Thursday nights and having Hazel home on Fridays (which we have now named Mommydays), I do not seem to get my Friday post written. This week at least I put the pictures together of our latest fruit exploration. Now to write the post before Thursday night so it will get up next week. Well at least it is time for Sharing Saturday! Once again I am blown away by the great ideas shared last week. Thank you to everyone who shared and to those who took the time to visit some of the other great ideas shared. We did have a tie for the most clicked--it looks like people are in the mood for fall and Halloween. We had a good number of spider themed posts, so I featured them as well as a couple of the fall ones (besides the most clicked) and of course some of my favorites including some multicultural ones as well as a spring one for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere!

Book Review: The Pandas and Their Chopsticks and Other Animal Stories by Demi

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Disclosure: Wisdom Tales Press gave me a copy of this product free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

Today I am going to share a fun book which was recently released by Wisdom Tales Press. The book is The Pandas and Their Chopsticks And Other Animal Stories by Demi. I asked to review this book because lately Hazel has been really into panda bears and figured she would love it.

This book takes ten classic Asian animal fables and adapts them to have universal appeal. Each of the ten stories has a moral or lesson stated at the end. Needless to say Hazel loved it.  I enjoyed reading the fun stories and with morals like learning to share, being careful around people who brag, it is sometimes better to listen than talk, our faults will follow us unless we change them, who couldn't love to read and teach your child these lessons. Some of the morals were written in words that Hazel had trouble understanding, so each one was a starting point to talk about what it means with the story to illustrate it. I always love books that give us a starting point for conversations about things that matter in life.

The pages themselves are beautiful. The colors and illustrations make the story come alive with room for the imagination to full in the story as well. The stories are short and clear and presented beautifully on the pages. It is truly a wonderful book.

For more posts about books from Wisdom Tales and about Asia check out:

• Everyone Prays by Alexis York Lumbard
• Korean Folk Songs
• Asian Pacific Islander Book Round-Up
• Asian Kites
• All About Japan
• Learning Japanese with books and flashcards
• Exploring Japan with books and more
• Sora and the Cloud
• All About Indonesia 
• Mei-Mei's Lucky Birthday Noodles 
• Mulan and My First Book of Chinese Words

Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

This is the third week of the Hispanic Heritage Month. We are participating in the Multicultural Kid Blogs Hispanic Heritage Month Blog Hop and Giveaway. You can enter the giveaway here by scrolling down as well. We are sharing something we have done to celebrate or learn about Hispanic cultures each week during the month. Today we are sharing the story of Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe. We discovered this story by reading The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe by Pat Mora. There are however many books that discuss the story and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We also have enjoyed thus far Tomie de Paolo's Our Lady of Guadalupe. Here are some other books we found at the library that share some part of the story or how the festivals are celebrated.

DIY Sesame Street Birthday Party

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My good friend's youngest son turned one last week. For his first birthday party she decided to do a Sesame Street themed party. She bought some decorations, but did much of it herself with some help from me and a few friends and her mom. She had the party at our church. She and her husband have large families, so there are a lot of people. She made some adorable tissue paper characters. They sat on the cake table. She got the idea here.

For decorations she had some Sesame Street tablecloths and bought a couple of decoration kits. Then she made favor bags. She had Cookie Monster, Elmo, Bert and Oscar. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of the Cookie Monster ones. She got the idea here.

Her mother and she made Elmo and Cookie Monster cupcakes. They were so cute!!

Then Hazel and I made a bowling game for the party. We were inspired by Sharing the Wealth: Sesame Street Birthday Party. They are very easy to make. We used empty plastic water bottles, construction paper and some printouts of the heads as well as Bert and Ernie's shirts. The heads are copyrighted, so I cannot share them, but I just googled the characters until I found what I wanted. I made them about 3.5 inches wide.

We wrapped the bottle in the paper and then glued on the heads. By the end of the party they were destroyed, but this is because several of the young boys were very hard on them and wanted to just kick and step on the bottles. We used the ball from one of Hazel's toy bowling sets.

She also bought a pin the nose on Elmo game. This would be pretty easy to make yourself. The one nice thing of the bought one is the noses were stickers.

She wanted two crafts for the kids whose ages really varied (one to preteen). The first was to decorate a hat with foam stickers.

Hazel wore her purple hat the entire time. She loved it! The second craft I found for her at Katherine Marie Photography. We decided to use paper cups instead of plastic for the ease of glue sticking.

These were the samples of Cookie Monster, Abby and Elmo that Hazel and I made. We only had pom poms and eyes. The two crafts got combined by the end and many of the older kids made character hats and used the foam on the cups. They had fun.

So that was the fun first birthday party we went to this weekend!! So many great DIY ideas!! We loved it!!

WordWorld: Kooky Spooky Halloween DVD Review and Giveaway

Disclosure: NCircle Entertainment gave me a copy of the DVD free of charge and is supplying the one for the giveaway free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the DVD on NCircle Entertainment's site for your convenience. You can also find their DVDs at local retailers!

I am so excited to share this DVD with you today. Now before I share it I want to make sure you know a couple of things:

1. I really do not like the scary part of Halloween. I like taking Hazel trick-or-treating, and seeing the young children in their cute costumes.
2. Hazel is scared easily and does not like the scary parts of Halloween.
3. Hazel is learning to read and sound out words at school this year.

Now knowing those three things, I have to say this is one of the best Halloween DVDs for her. She has been asking me to watch WordWorld. When we first saw it on television she was in the Waldorf School and we were already breaking the rule of no media and I was not about to introduce words to her as well. Then when she switched schools, we could never find it on any of our PBS stations. So I jumped at the chance to review a WordWorld DVD. It being a Halloween one scared me a bit seeing how even The Wiggles: Wiggly Halloween frightened her a bit last year in parts. However, the WordWorld Kooky Spooky Halloween did not frighten her at all. She loved it and so did I.