It’s no secret that Miss G and I adore books. We’ve got shelves and shelves of them and I have absolutely no guilt about adding a few favourites here and there. I add them to Easter baskets, they’re part of our Christmas Eve tradition, and they’re a staple birthday gift in our house… You just can’t have too many, in my opinion.
This week’s book club book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, is a book that Miss G and I both knew, but not one we absolutely loved previously. Well, that changed this week. As soon as we watched the video of Michael Rosen performing his story, we couldn’t get enough.
Something I’ve recently started making sure we make time for is fun, hands-on book activities. I’ve always loved extending favourite read alouds with fun learning activities in my classroom, and Miss G absolutely adores reading books, so I’m not sure why it took this long, but heh – here we are.
If you ask Gracen what she wants for dinner, 95% of the time she’ll say, ‘pasta!’ or ‘tofu!’, or some combination of the two. So this afternoon when I asked her what we should make for dinner, I was definitely not expecting, ‘Ummm… Chicken soup with rice – just like in the book!’
I must admit that I was especially pleased with this answer because I’ve been wanting to start doing activities based on our favourite books for what seems like forever now, but somehow I just haven’t made it happen yet. To get started, we read through each poem in Chicken Soup With Rice and then talked about what we’d like our chicken soup with rice to be like. G decided that it would have ‘some chicken and some rice – OF COURSE – and some veggies because they have lots of good vitamins’. With that, off to the fridge we went.
She scavenged through the crisper and decided that we’d use these vegetables for our soup, which was perfectly fine with me.
I worked on chopping them up…
While she worked on shredding some leftover chicken we had in the fridge from the night before.
We slowly cooked up our big pot of soup throughout the afternoon, and when dinner arrived, served it with some fresh bread and a reading of Chicken Soup With Rice by Miss G. ☺