Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag - Marjorie W. Sharmat

For our last week of Summer Reading Club this summer we chose a fun and easy read.  Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag was a quick read for our friends, and as a bonus it included lots of fun beachy activity ideas after the story was over!

We used sand paper and construction paper to create our own sandcastle scenes on paper.  There was lots of scissors and glue and sharing of ideas and we got to see some pretty fabulous beach crafts.

The artists at work

Finished Sandcastle Scenes

We had some cousins join us so our group was a little bigger this week.

 After we talked about the book and helped Nate solve the mystery, we headed out in the backyard for an end-of-summer beachy swim party and frozen ocean pops (recipe from the book).

Summer fun beach party!

Super tasty Frozen Ocean Pops, with bonus Swedish Fish

We've had great fun reading with you this summer.  

See you next year!

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

This week's book was "Fortunately, the Milk" by Neil Gaiman.

There's no milk.  And Mum's away.

So Dad saves the day by going to buy some. Really, that’s all that happens. Very boring. Soooooooo boring. YAAAAAAAWWWN. You don't want to read it. 

We loved talking about Professor Steg and *her* fabulous time-traveling Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier and the adventures that Dad went on all while simply trying to bring a bottle of milk home to his children for their poor, sad, dry Toastios.

We used this online reading activity pack to create our own dinosaurs and Fortunate Milk cartons, and discussed questions from this list and this list.

making milk cartons

Fortunately, the Milk... cartons!

For our treat we had... Milk!  (And since you can't really have milk without them, we also had chocolate chip cookies.)

Building Club - Legos Week!

This week we took advantage of J's recent trip to Legoland and built all kinds of things with Legos!

We started with a tall tower, and then shortly moved on to a zoo, then a multicolored dance floor, a cupcake party, and then finally a fantastic underground city (under the coffee table).

We had more boys than girls this time (first time!), and everyone worked well together and used their great imaginations to create some amazing worlds.

Who Was George Washington? by Roberta Edwards

Since later this week we will celebrate our country's Independence Day, we took this afternoon to read about and discuss our first president in "Who Was George Washington?" by Roberta Edwards.

We talked about President Washington's home in Virginia and how much he loved it.  We read some of his "Rules of Civility" and the girls took a few minutes to talk about their favorite rule and a rule they would try to remember from his list.

After a quick book discussion we moved on to our delicious treat.  We had rectangle sugar cookies that we decorated to look like U.S. flags with frosting and berries.  A delicious and patriotic treat!

Book Club - Frindle by Andrew Clements

Today we had a great time discussing Frindle by Andrew Clements.  I used the Literature Circle Questions from the Scholastic Website to start our discussion and I was very pleased with how well all the kids remembered the book and really enjoyed it and wanted to share their thoughts with the group.















After we discussed the book and Nick's experience with creating a new name for an old object, the kids tried their hand at the same trick.  Each reader was given an item and had to create a new name for it and then give the group five clues about their item.  One friend renamed an airplane into a "reeper," and told us that it can fly, it has a motor, it has wings, and lands on wheels, and it stays at the airport.  First they tried to guess what it was just from the name, and then as each clue was read.  They were very creative changing the names of everyday objects:  Comb became "booka," shoe became "ecoe," rope became "ener," and hammer became "trindo."

Later we kind of strayed from the theme of the book to celebrate E's birthday.  She will turn eight tomorrow so she wanted to have a gift exchange with her book club.  We had a White Elephant gift exchange (and only one of the boys ended up with girly gifts).  After an extra round of trading everyone ended up quite happy with their prizes.

Then we were able to combine birthday theme and book theme and have some birthday cake for our treat.  In our book, when the principal came to discuss Nick's behavior with his parents they offered her banana bread, so E chose a banana cake to share with her friends.














Finally, despite the 100-degree-plus temperatures outside, everyone took a few minutes to burn off the cake in the backyard.  They came back in to cool off and explore their gifts a little more before parents came to pick them up.

Next time, in anticipation of Independence Day, we will discuss "Who Was George Washington" by Roberta Edwards.  We're looking forward to more time with friends!

Building Club - Geotrax Week

Today was Geotrax Week in Building Club.  We had a great time building a race track for Lightning McQueen and Mater and building all kinds of tracks for the other trains.

Our friend M was so kind as to bring snacks to share with us and the kids loved having pretzels, animal crackers and Craisins in the backyard.

We have a great group of friends and love having them over for Building Club!

Book Club - "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" by Louis Sachar

Our first week of book club was a success!  Three friends were able to join E this week and we had a great time discussing our book, "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" by Louis Sachar.

As the friends were arriving we had them fill out a paper so we could play a simple game of "Can You Guess Who I Am?"  Most of the kids know each other but there are a few who go to different schools so we wanted them to all be able to get acquainted.  Everyone secretly wrote down five things about themselves to help the others guess who they were.  The kids knew each other well enough to guess pretty much everyone by the second fact, but it was fun to give them a moment to tell us the things they think are special about them.

Once we were all settled down after getting to know each other, we got out our copies and talked about our favorite chapters of this wacky book.  The girls loved Chapter 19, which E even memorized.  (Don't be impressed; it's only three sentences long.)

We read aloud from Chapter 6 about Bebe Gunn, the fastest draw in art class, and then we each tried to develop her talent while playing a rousing game of Pictionary Junior.

They split up into their own teams...

T and P on the White Girls team

E and J playing for the Black Girls!

Finally we talked about Chapter 14, where Mrs. Jewls made special ice cream flavors that tasted like each of the children in her class.  We didn't have any kid-flavored ice cream in the house, so we just had to have Blue Bell ice cream sundaes.  (Never before have such small people eaten so many toppings!)

pre-ice cream disaster mess

Quick, somebody throw all the cherries on the floor!

While they ate we talked about books they had read in the last few months and made a list of books we might want to read and discuss in our club.  Then for the last few minutes they watched Wayside the Movie and laughed and played.




It was a great first outing for Book Club and we are excited for next time when we will discuss "Frindle" by Andrew Clements.