Woohoo! Today is the first day of our new round of Preschool Book Club, and Miss G and I are so excited! We’ve got soooo many fun books and activities planned for the coming weeks, as do our friends from Buggy and Buddy, Sugar Aunts, Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails, and Homegrown Friends.
Oh my goodness… It feels like Gracen and I have been waiting for this week’s instalment of our preschool book club forever! Shortly after sharing our magnetic polka dot sensory bag inspired by Press Here {one of our favourites}, Herve Tullet’s publicist contacted us and asked if we’d be interested in checking out his newest book, Mix It Up! Ummm.. YES?! {And stay tuned until the end of the post, because we’re also giving away a copy to one of our lovely readers!}
{this post contains affiliate links}While Halloween may be over for most, today Miss G and I celebrated once again with the wonderful mamas and munchkins of our play school co-op. Now, while she very easily could have worn the mermaid costume I made just a couple of days back, I couldn’t help but make Grae another one… A paper bag princess costume based on one of my favourite Robert Munsch books, The Paper Bag Princess!
Not going to lie, this week’s preschool book club was a bit of a tough one… Tough because firstly, we couldn’t find the book anywhere. We visited bookshops, we visited grocery stores with book sections, we visited our school’s library, and we asked pretty much all of our friends. No book! Brad eventually scrounged up a digital version for us to see on the iPad, but after a friend suggested it this morning, I’m guessing that one of Kuwait’s many Instagram shops would have had it! I hadn’t thought of that. {Is this an around the world thing, or a Kuwait specific thing? Here you can order almost anything via Instagram and Whatsapp and have the items delivered to your door.} The second thing that made this week’s PBC challenging was that without the book physically in my hands, I had no inspiration. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a fun activity to go with it. It was frustrating. Eventually though, I thought of something {a very simple math game focused on addition and subtraction} and it’s pretty awesome. Not awesome because it was crazy cool or unique, but awesome because Gracen did not want to stop playing. In fact, we played from about 9:00 to 10:45 a.m. yesterday morning. One round after the next – non-stop! I love when something that was initially challenging turns out so well.
{this post contains affiliate links}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.
{this post contains affiliate links}When Miss G was gifted The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds last spring, we immediately fell in love. The story is about a little girl named Vashti whose paper is blank at the end of art class. After telling her teacher that she ‘just CAN’T draw!’, the teacher uses subtle and clever encouragement to get Vashti to step out of her comfort zone. Vashti starts by just making a mark, but that one mark ends up becoming something beautiful as Vashti lets go and gains confidence. In the end, not only does Vashti become a confident artist, but she also helps others who are feeling insecure with their ability to create art. Pretty awesome storyline, right?
{this post contains affiliate links}This week of our preschool book club was a much anticipated one. Our book, Press Here by Hervé Tullet, has been a favourite of ours for a very long time due to its interactive nature, so we couldn’t wait to explore it further. If you’ve not read it before, each page requires the reader to complete an action of some sort before moving on to the next page to see what has happened to the dots {for example, ‘five quick taps on the yellow dot’ or ‘try shaking the book…just a little bit’}. Definitely a fun and unique book!
Now that we’ve been back in Kuwait for almost a week and the worst of our jet lag seems to be over with, Miss G and I have been enjoying getting back into our regular routine. Our days have been filled with fun outings, play dates with friends, and fun activities at home – including our first instalment of our second round of our awesome little preschool book club with some of our online friends!
Oh my word… I’m pretty sure book activities are quickly becoming Miss G’s favourite thing ever. So much so that when I asked her what she’d like to do the other day and proceeded to suggest a trip to the beach, a morning at the pool, or a visit to an indoor play area, she quickly responded with, ‘I know! I want to do another fun book activity!’ So that’s what we did. {Apparently the fun outings can wait.}
Oh my goodness… Gracen has just been loving the book activities we’ve been doing with our Preschool Book Club! So much so that yesterday while she was happily engaged in an activity not based on a book, she stopped suddenly and announced, ‘I know what this activity needs! A book to go with it!!’ Then she ran to the shelf, sorted through to find a story that coordinated with the project, and brought it over, declaring, ‘Now that’s better!’ Hah!
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.
Something I’ve wanted to start doing with Gracen for a long time now is fun hands-on activities based on our very favourite books. We looove reading and because we have a limited book collection and limited access to outside libraries here in Kuwait, our favourites get read over and over and over again. What I’m saying is – getting a little more out of them with a corresponding activity is a very good thing {and would be even if we had a huge home library}.
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. ☺
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