Story Stretcher Activity - Friendship with George and Martha

I was reading through some blogs when I ran across this plug for a book called Story Stretchers. Basically it gives childrens's books and ideas of acitivities to do related to the story. Some are art activities and some are active games or others. I thought it sounded super so I went straight to my library's website and requested it. When it arrived, I flipped through it and quickly grew excited about giving some of the activities a try.

The books chapters are each a different theme and I picked Friendship as something I wanted to focus on with my kids, so I requested each of the 5 books on friendship from the library. A few of them came in, so we did our first activities today. (Note there are 5 activities for each children's book listed, but I just chose a couple simple ones that I had the supplies for and I thought my kids would like.)

George and Martha - One Fine Day by James Marshall

First, we used the ideas in Story Stretchers to talk about the cover of the book and general things about friendship. Then we read the book. After that we did two activities, one was an art activity and the other was to play fun music and walk around on a pretend tightrope. My kids both had great fun. They love this kind of little planned activity with mom, and they love books, so I think this is a perfect fit for us.

There was a third activity that I had originally planned on doing but it involved a nature walk and I was not up for that today. This worked out really well today and I want to do more of these. I would like to try to plan a little in advance so we can do some of the more ambitious activities but even the simple ones will work out too.

What I'm Reading

Well it has been 4 months since I posted what I have been reading but I definitely have been reading. I have to get to bed so I'll just leave you with the covers.

Here's the most recent ones:

Unplugged Project : Paint

This week's project - Paint.

The boys had a great time painting - they were excited from the time I mentioned the word as we don't really pull the paints out much. I was so happy this was the theme as I had two new things I wanted to try out. The first was my new wipe-clean tablecloth that I bought on a summer sale at Fred Meyer. The second was an trick I learned by looking at other unplugged projects late last year. We used egg cartons as paint pallettes. It worked great and the kids had great fun.



I just let them do their own thing while I hung out nearby and offered assistance as needed. I even managed to get a batch of granola in the oven. A huge highlight for them was that I gave them each a little cup of water to "clean" off their brush between colors. They made about 3 pictures each over about an hour I would say.