Virtual Book Club for Kids & Giveaway--Room on the Broom

As I mentioned in my introduction post, the March Author for the Virtual Book Club for Kids is Julia Donaldson. Now before she was picked, I had not heard of Julia Donaldson. Now I am so glad I have. We love so many of her books. I will be posting multiple books throughout the three weeks. This week I am sharing one of Hazel's favorites, Room on the Broom.

For those that do not know what the Virtual Book Club for Kids is, I have joined a group of amazing bloggers who pick an author each month and each blog picks a book (or more) by this author and posts a craft or activity to go with the book. Then we all host a blog hop so you can share a craft or activity to go with a book by this author. The wonderful bloggers are:

Toddler Approved - Rainy Day Mum - Adventures in Reading with Kids - 3 Dinosaurs - Royal Baloo - The Educators' Spin On It - Inspiration Laboratories - Pleasantest Thing - Edventures with Kids - Two Big Two Little - Playing With Words 365 - Kitchen Counter Chronicles - Outlaw Mom - Mommy and Me Book Club - Crafty Moms Share - No Twiddle Twaddle - The Good Long Road - Ready. Set. Read 2 Me - Reading Confetti - Mama Smiles - Juggling with Kids- Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas - Creekside Learning - Creative Family Fun - The Usual Mayhem - Teach Preschool - PlayDrMom - CraftoArt - Here Come the Girls - Being a Conscious Parent - Smiling like Sunshine - Crayon Freckles - Train Up a Child - Smile Play Learn - Enchanted Homeschooling Mom - Coffee Cups and Crayons - Having Fun at Chelle's House- Love, Play, Learn - Juggling With Kids - Motherhood on a Dime - Growing Book By Book

- This Reading Mama - Fantastic Fun and Learning

This month is extra special because The Gruffalo Brand has offered two of her most loved books,  The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child. Both of these books have been adapted into two award winning animated films. You can purchase the films at this link. And you can see the trailers for both here. To enter the giveaway for the books, you must be a resident of the United States and over 18. Then you can simply enter by following the Rafflecopter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more Gruffalo Giveaways make sure you visit the following blogs:

• Royal Baloo is giving away a copy of The Gruffalo Book and Movie! 
• Toddler Approved! is giving away 2 Gruffalo Prize packs! 
• Playing with Words 365 is giving away a copy of The Gruffalo Book and Movie!

Now onto our book. First I will say Hazel often goes around with her little broom between her legs telling me she is flying. Needless to say why we love this book! This story is about a witch and her cat going out for a ride on the witch's broom. However she keeps losing things in the wind: her hat, her hair bow, her wand. Each time she loses something, they land and look for it and each time a new animal comes out with it and asks if there is room on the broom for them. Then she ends up with herself, her cat, a dog, a green bird and a frog.

Our first broom is a piece of pine tree branch we found in our yard. It got rather full with just the witch and cat but you can only imagine with all four animals.

Well the weight of all the creatures on the broom split the broom in half and the witch's half flies off into the clouds while the other half falls. The witch ends up meeting a dragon who loves to eat witches with fries.

I borrowed our dragon from our Irish Cinderella we posted the other day.

The dragon says this once he will have witch with no fries and is about to eat her when out of the lagoon comes a black covered creature with four heads. The dragon has never seen such a scary creature before and the creature claims the witch as its. The dragon apologizes and leaves as fast as he can. Then the bird flies off the creature and the frog jumps down and the cat finally gets off the dog. The witch is so happy to have been saved by her friends. She needs to make a new broom and tells them all to find something to add to the brew. They end up with a designer broom with a proper space for each of them.

We did not make the designer broom, but we did make a sample broom with a stick and some yarn. I made her some peg dolls for the animals and the witch.

Now the exciting news is there is a film coming out soon for Room on the Broom. You can check out the Facebook page for this film and the Pinterest Board. Plus The Gruffalo Brand has a Room on the Broom page with a trailer to the film, all the different versions of the book, and an activities section including finger puppets to make out of paper and word activities!

Now it is your turn to share a Julia Donaldson book or if you do not know her books, check out some of these other posts so you can decide which one to read first!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Well even with us all feeling a bit rundown and/or sick, we managed to have a fun St. Patrick's Day with two of the meals Irish themed.We took the recipes from two books we got out of the library.

Fairy Tales in Different Cultures--Cinderlad

With it being St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to share another Irish Cinderella. If you missed my post last week sharing Fair, Brown and Trembling, you can check it out and on it I shared some information about Ireland. Since I already shared the information there, I'm going to skip that part of this post. So this week's story is a bit different. It is called Cinderlad. The book we read is by Shirley Climo. The first major difference is the Cinderella character is male. And he saves a princess from death, but that is getting ahead of ourselves.

This book begins with the birth of a baby boy. His mother names him Becan, which means "little one" in Irish. Becan's feet grew unusually large, but he remained relatively short. His mother died while he was young. His father who was a peddler was away often and would bring back what was needed. One day he came back with a new wife and her three almost grown daughters. Then he went off to work again. The stepmother and her daughters watched Becan and always blamed everything on him. The daughters called him Little Big Foot. Eventually the stepmother got sick of having him around and sent him off to be a herdboy for the cows. Becan was fine with this however he was afraid of the tales he heard about the large speckled bull who could kill a man by kicking him. 

One day the bull arrived at the field where Becan took his father's cows. Becan scratched him in the same place the cows liked to be scratched and they became friends. Becan would tell the bull about his problems and one day the bull talked back. He told Becan he would not starve while he was around and told him to pull out what was in his ear. This was an amazing meal wrapped in a table cloth. After that every day the bull would come at lunch time to feed Becan. He stopped accepting the scraps his stepmother offered for dinner and she became suspicious. She sent her eldest daughter to spy on him to see who was feeding him. The daughter came home and reported to the mother. The mother told her they would kill the bull and have a nice stew. Becan heard everything although they thought he was asleep. 

At day break Becan ran off to warn his friend. The bull told him to jump on his back and they would escape. The traveled a long way until the bull stopped and told Becan that this is where they would say goodbye. He told him a grey bull would come to fight him and the grey bull would kill him. When he died he told Becan to twist off his extra long tail and wear it as a belt. Becan should use it whenever he needed the bull the most. Becan was horrified at this thought, but the bull insisted. All happened as the speckled bull said. The grey bull arrived and they fought all day. At days end the speckled bull was dead and the grey bull had disappeared. Becan cried all night by his friend then remembering what he said he easily twisted off his tail and wrapped it around his body twice as a belt. Then he reached in his ear one more time and pulled out the white table cloth and covered the bull with it. Then he wandered off on his own. 

While walking on his own, his feet hurt (he was barefoot) and eventually a gentleman offered him a ride on his horse. When Becan told him he was going anywhere he offered Becan a job as a herdboy. The gentleman warned him that his next door neighbor was an arhach (a giant) and told him to stay on his side of the fence. Becan always wanted to see a giant, so he did not listen. When the horse, cows, sheep and donkey had eaten all the grass on the gentleman's side of the fence, Becan climbed up and saw that the giant had lots of grass and apple trees. He knocked down some of the stones of the fence so the animals could pass over it and then they all went to where there was food. The giant arrived and almost killed Becan until he remembered his bull tail belt.

The bull tail wrapped itself around the giant's neck. The giant begged for him to remove it and Becan said he only would if the giant gave him his boots and disappeared forever. The giant gave Becan his boots which fit him perfectly and also dropped his sword which Becan picked up and wore in his belt.

One day the gentleman warned Becan to stay close to home because it was Dragon Day in Kinsale. He explained that every year the dragon came out of the ocean and ate the most fair maiden. If the fairest maiden was not tied to the post to be eaten the dragon would make the water swell over the entire town. This year the fairest maiden was the king's own daughter, Princess Finola. Well of course, Becan went off to see what was going to happen. He rode the man's donkey to town and saw the princess tied to a post. Everyone around her ignored her cries for help and would not look at her. Then he said he would fight for her. And the dragon appeared.

He and the dragon fought for a long time. His arm got tired of swinging the giant's sword. When he pricked the dragon with it, the dragon acted like it was a minor pinprick. Then Becan remembered the bull's tail and pulled it off. It magically wrapped itself around the dragon's jaws and the dragon returned to the sea with the tail.

Princess Finola wanted to thank him, but at the same time he heard his three stepsisters call out "Little Big Foot" and he wanted to escape. Princess Finola reached out for him and grabbed his boot. He rode the donkey away having lost one boot. Princess Finola announced she would only marry the man who fit the boot since he was the only one who had helped her. The king sent a messenger out looking for the man who fit the boot. It was a year before the messenger arrived at the gentleman's house. The gentleman tried it on and it slid right off. Then he told the messenger to let the boy try it on. The messenger didn't think a herdboy would be the one, but let him do it anyway. Of course it fit and Becan told them he had its mate in the cowshed. Becan rode the gentleman's horse to the castle where Princess Finola waited for him. She commented on how they were the same height so they would see eye-to-eye on things and told him he would now be Prince Becan. They got married and lived happily ever after.

Our crafts for this book were of course our peg dolls and then we used DLTK toilet paper roll crafts for the bull and the dragon. We used a paper towel roll for the giant and just made it ourselves. 

Later this week we will be sharing more Irish cooking and hope you will join us. Tomorrow we will feature the first of this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids posts and it will include a giveaway. Please come see and enter!!

Source

Sharing Saturday 13-11

Well once again I was inspired by so many of the posts shared last week. If you have not had a chance to check them all out you should. There are lots of St. Patrick's Day ideas there. Also make sure you check out the features over at my co-host blog, Having Fun at Chelle's House. Now onto my features. This week we had a tie for most clicked.

1) From Gift of Curiosity: Magic Leprechaun Rocks (What a neat idea to celebrate St. Patrick's Day!)

2) From The Wilderness Wife: Easter Egg Decorating Ideas (A wonderful round-up of all sorts of ideas for children of any age!)

I guess everyone is thinking about two of the upcoming holidays or at least were last week when you visited each other's posts.

A Few of My Favorites

1) From Like Mama ~ Like Daughter: Beautiful Mess (A wonderful post reminding us how important the mother/child bond is even when we are overtired from being up with a sick baby. Now I'll admit I spent the day with a very sick little girl and am not feeling so great myself, so this may have had something to do with this post being a favorite today.)

2) From The Usual Mayhem: Walk to Talk (Wonderful ways to use nature walks to get your children talking and helping with language.)

3) From We Made That: Water Density Experiment (Who wouldn't want to make a rainbow in a glass?)

4) From School Time Snippets: Number Line Smash (A wonderful game to practice your arithmetic facts. Just remember I am a math nerd as a former math teacher, so they tend to be my favorites.) 

Thank you to everyone who shared last week!! If you were one of the ones picked as a feature here, please feel free to grab a featured button to display proudly on your blog.

Button Code:

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My Week in Review: This week I shared Lady Winter & Sister Spring and Our Weather, Signs of Spring & Irish Chicken and Leek Pie, Pi Day and the history of pi, Rainbows, Leprechaun Trap and an Irish Cinderella

 

Now for This Week's Party 
 
A Few Simple Guidelines:
1)  Please follow Crafty Moms Share and Having Fun at Chelle's House via GFC (or one of the other ways that work for you).  

2)  Link any kid-friendly, child-centered post. Please no etsy shops or giveaways, etc.  Remember to link to your actual post. 

3) Post the newly updated button on your sidebar or somewhere on your blog to help spread the word.

Button Code:

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4) I would love it if you would follow me on Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest as well as Having Fun at Chelle's House at Facebook and Pinterest

Disclaimer: By sharing here, you are giving Crafty Moms Share and Having Fun at Chelle's House permission to use your photos for features and to pin your craft at Pinterest. 

Happy Pi Day

Today is the official holiday of Pi Day!! As a former math teacher, I love to celebrate it. Last year I gave you some of the sheets I used with my high school classes to celebrate it and to justify our having pie. This year I thought I would look at a bit of the history of pi.

Irish Chicken and Leek Pie--and some signs of spring!

Well this year (March through February) I have joined some great bloggers in traveling the world through dishes. Our first stop is Ireland. Since I shared a bit about Ireland the other day with the first of the Irish Cinderellas, I will skip doing it again. I am very excited to join this group, because I see it as such a wonderful way to expose Hazel to new cultures and countries and for her to learn a bit more about the world. 

Before we take our trip to Ireland, however, I am going to share with you the reason we did not make Irish Soda Bread today and why Hazel did not help me with the Irish Chicken and Leek Pie for dinner. We had a beautiful feels like spring day. So we went out to play this afternoon. When Steve got done with work, he came out and I came in to cook dinner and go to my Weight Watchers meeting. 

Hazel and I went on a walk around our neighborhood looking for signs of spring. We saw budding trees, birds, and the tops of flower plants poking up. We went home and filled a suet feeder with scraps of yarn, wool roving and ribbon and hung it on a tree and we filled the bird feeder. Then Hazel pulled out her magnifying glass and eventually pulled out her garden shovel and rake and dug in the garden. When I came back out, Hazel had been joined by our next door neighbor who is eleven but still loves to play with Hazel and they were having a great time rebuilding their fairy house. And for those of you who read our post about the snow storm last week, here is what is left of Hazel's snow mountain.

It is amazing how fast it is melting!! I am glad robin has woken Sister Spring up!

Ok, now back to Ireland! Today we tried a recipe from a book I got out of the library, Cooking the Irish Way by Helga Hughes. It came from the children's section so I thought it would be great to get Hazel and I trying some Irish cooking. I decided to try the chicken and leek pie. I was not sure how Steve and Hazel would feel about the leek aspect, but figured I would give it a try. Overall, we all loved it. Hazel was not totally sure about the leeks, but ate them mixed in with everything else.

I did change the recipe a bit, but not too much.

Chicken and Leek Pie (adapted from Cooking the Irish Way by Helga Hughes)
1 package ready made pie crust (I bought frozen, but would have preferred refrigerated)
6 slices of uncured precooked bacon (this is the only way we really do bacon in my house)
1 tablespoon olive oil (The recipe called for bacon fat)
2 small leeks, chopped (I bought already cleaned ones)
1 1/2 cups of chicken breast already cooked and cut into bite size pieces
6 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
4 tablespoons nonfat milk
1/2 cup fat free sour cream
1 cup frozen mixed vegetables (I put these in in case Hazel or Steve would not eat the leeks)
2 tablespoons fresh parsley chopped
2 tablespoons milk for glazing

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Press one of the crusts into pie pan. Cook/heat bacon in microwave and then chop it.

In skillet heat oil. While heating put chicken and leeks into large ziploc bag and add flour. Shake to coat chicken and leeks with flour. Put chicken and leeks into oil and discard excess flour. Stir and brown leeks and chicken. Remove from heat.

Stir in the bacon, rosemary, pepper, milk, sour cream and mixed vegetables. Then spoon into pie crust. Sprinkle parsley on top. Then cover with second pie crust. Glaze with milk by using brush or paper towel. Cut slits in pie (unless you used a frozen one like me and it already had slits/cuts through it). 

Put in oven for 20 minutes at 400. Then turn temperature down to 350 and bake for 15-20 minutes longer, until crust is a light golden brown.

We had ours with the suggested salad. Then Hazel and I had strawberries for dessert. A delicious meal!! We will be trying some more Irish recipes this week, so stay tuned!!

You can find an Ireland coloring placemat right here and the passport right here (the cover for the passport is right here for you!).

To Catch a Leprechaun...

Well, I think I am finally having my dear grandmother, Hazel, smiling down at me. She is the one who provides me and Hazel with a bit of Irish blood. Hazel and I have been reading some Irish stories and we decided to make a leprechaun trap. Now I got the idea for this and the rainbows Hazel colored from DLTK. We of course gave it our own twist. 

We found a squarish box and covered it with green construction paper. We left a hole for an opening on top. Then we began decorating. While decorating we also made a ladder out of gold pipe cleaners and I got the idea of adding some signs. We decided to call it End of the Rainbow Inn. Then I also made a sign saying "Leprechauns Welcome". You can get the signs at  Leprechaun Trap Signs. 

We put some cottony fluff inside so the leprechaun will have a soft place to stay. We covered the hole with green sparkly ribbon looking a bit like a rainbow shape. Hazel is so excited to catch a leprechaun. She keeps asking if there are any in our town and what do you think it will say. 

I bought some chocolate gold coins to put in it and I think I will make her a leprechaun--either a peg doll or needle felt or bendy. I haven't decided which yet. She cannot wait to check it on St. Patrick's Day. We also tried the cupcake leprechaun that we say over at I HEART CRAFTY THINGS. We also made one with a paper plate. We put the cupcake liner one on our trap and will hang the paper plate one up as a decoration. We are thinking tomorrow will be another fun day of baking some Irish soda bread and learning more about Ireland.

Oh, we also planted some shamrocks or clover. We bought a package the other day, so I doubt they will grow in time for St. Patrick's Day, but Hazel loved planting them.

Rainbows, Spring and St. Patrick's Day

So as I stated the other day, we are ready for spring. We have been busy thinking about spring crafts and putting away our winter decorations. Today I am going to focus on a couple rainbow crafts we have done. After all, rainbows seem to say spring as well as St. Patrick's Day. 

The first one I saw on I Can Teach My Child. We changed it a bit by using wooden beads, white clay and adding a sun coming out of the clouds.

After making this craft, I decided to make Hazel a needle felted picture of a rainbow. I took a piece of white wool felt and needled a light blue roving all over it for the background.

Then I added the rainbow using small amounts of each color. After the rainbow, I added some clouds and tried to make them three-dimensional and added a bit of grey to the white in them. And of course I added some sun, so it would be like the craft we did together. Now to find a place to hang it.

Fairy Tales in Different Cultures--Fair, Brown & Trembling

Well with St. Patrick's Day approaching we have been thinking Irish lately. So I thought this week we would share one of the Irish Cinderellas. We will explore the second one next Sunday since the Virtual Book Club for Kids will be on Monday (and Sunday is St. Patrick's Day). This week we will be looking at Fair, Brown and Trembling by Jude Daly. This version seems a bit softer than the versions I have read on-line at Sacred Texts and Authorma. But before we explore the story, let us learn a bit about Ireland.

Lady Winter and Sister Spring

So I have been trying to focus on Easter and other religious posts for my Sundays lately, however with the week we have had, I had to share this post instead. Late last spring we discovered what has become my favorite change of season book, How Robin Saved Spring by Debbie Ouellet. I needle felted Hazel the two main characters in the book at this time.

This story is about how two sisters, Lady Winter and Sister Spring, live. Sister Spring sleeps through winter and awakens to begin the spring weather and season. Lady Winter wants to stay in control with blankets of white snow everywhere, so she knits a magic blanket that will keep her younger sister sleeping while she is under it. The animals and trees want spring to begin, so they try to wake Sister Spring. Throughout the story the reader hears how certain characteristics of animals and the tree came to be. Finally the robin manages to wake Sister Spring with some sun rays, however he got burnt getting them and thus the red breast. For more information you can visit the author's site which is where I got the picture of the book since I cannot seem to find our copy. 

 

Now our weather this week the weather predictions have been a bit tough. The weather reports seemed to say that there was a chance of 3-6 inches of snow but near the coast it would be mostly rain. We live in a coastal town, but not near the coast, so we figured at most a few inches of snow. They did say the storm would last from Wednesday evening to Friday morning. My mother had been in the hospital and was suppose to be getting out between Wednesday through Friday. I was hoping it would be Friday since the storm was suppose to be over before they had to drive two hours home. However she got out on Thursday which now I am very happy about.

On Wednesday we began to have a few snow flurries, but not too much. Thursday the flurries continued but it was not sticking. When I went to bed Thursday night they were still saying 3-6 inches with the rain/snow line being close to the coast. On Friday, Hazel woke up around 5:30 a.m. and I went to get her snack so she would play in her room and listen to stories on CD while I continued to sleep. I turned the television on while getting her snack and there were barely any school cancellations. At 7 a.m. when I got up and we went to have breakfast, I turned the television on to see the weather report and almost every school was delayed. (Luckily Steve was able to work from home and did not have to deal with the horrific commute.) They were saying the snow would slow down by 10 a.m. and stop by noon. Well, at 10 a.m. it got worse. It was still snowing until about 3 p.m. Needless to say the weatherpeople were incorrect all over the place. As it slowed I took Hazel out to play. This is what we faced after our driveway was plowed (now mind you all the snow from the blizzard and other small storms had not melted completely yet).

Hazel has her sledding hill back! She also decided the part to the right looked like a throne. Needless to say she had a great time. I helped her go down the "hill" a few times.

Then I dug her a snow fort/igloo. The first one was too small so we moved to the hill and made a bigger one. She loved it.

She even painted it with her food coloring and water spray bottles. She tried to make purple and orange by spraying some colors. Also she made a doorbell and doorknob with the "paint."

Then she also wanted to have a snowball fight. This was the first snowfall this year that was good snowball snow.

 Then she played some more on her mountain while I tried to shovel out my car. Then Steve came out and finished the shoveling and I went in to take a nap. Hazel ended up playing with our next door neighbor who is eleven.

Mountain Climbing

Almost at the Top

Queen of the Mountain!

However our big discussion was that we would have much rather the robin we saw a few weeks ago had woken Sister Spring and we would have had the rain. Hazel of course enjoyed the snow though! We are hoping Sister Spring will awaken soon and get rid of all this cold and snow! Oh, and there have been mention that we need the other two sisters--Autumn and Summer. We are going to make our own stories up about them!