Children's Book Club; The Christmas Edition

Every month for the past two-and-a-half years I have met with a group of young mothers with children about the same age as mine and we have had Children's Book Club. Oh, it is so fun!

Our children take turns being the 'host' and they are responsible to chose the book they want to share with their friends. When the rest of the children arrive, the host shows the book they have chosen, tells the title and author and why they like the book. Then their mom reads the book aloud to the group, and we do a craft or activity, and have a snack that all relate to the book. The whole thing takes up about an hour (usually less!) so it isn't a huge time commitment, but wow, my kids love it.

We got to be the hosts recently, and my son picked a fun Christmas book we had borrowed from the library.

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies, by Laura Numeroff. We have read lots of books by this author, so when we saw there was a CHRISTMAS one, we knew it would be great.

It follows the usual pattern of a character moving from one activity to the next as something will distract her from what she is doing, or remind her of something else she wanted to do, until it loops back around to the thing she was doing in the first place. My kids got a kick out of it.

I served two kinds of popcorn for our treat. Of course, regular buttered popcorn -- like the mouse gets at the movies -- but I also wanted to make something fun and special for the kids, so I made caramel popcorn too.

Recipe:

1 cup white corn syrup

2 cups brown sugar

1 can eagle brand condensed milk

1/2 cup butter or margarine

2 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon salt

Boil the white corn syrup and the brown sugar in a saucepan over medium heat for 3 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and stir until combined. Pour over a large bowl of popped popcorn. Stir until coated evenly.

*tip - sift out the un-popped kernels from the popcorn before you add the caramel so you don't crack your tooth!

For the activity, I got a bunch of craft supplies that the mouse used in the book and the kids made ornaments for their Christmas trees. It was very open ended, and whatever they came up with was great. They all had fun with the glitter!

After our friends left and the glue was dry, we took the sparkly new decorations and added them to our tree.
Beautiful!