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.