Children's Book Club: The Halloween Edition

It was our turn to host Children's Book Club again this month, and with the date landing on Halloween morning, we simply had to go with that for our little theme!

We got two Halloween books from the library, and my guy liked the both so well that 10 minutes before we were due to start, he still didn't know which one he wanted to highlight. We ended up reading both. The first was The Halloween Kid, and it reads like a western. In it, the hero saves Halloween from some candy-eating goblins. The other was Franklin's Halloween. It was fine, but not very original; Franklin books tend to run together. But since my kids always like Franklin, they loved it.

For our craft we made these cute ghosties. Just strip off the socks, brush the bottoms of their feet with white paint, and step down on some black construction paper. We tried adding the googly eyes while the paint was wet, but it didn't stick well, and we ended up using a drop of white glue instead.

We also played a game of Musical Pumpkins. It is just like traditional musical chairs, but instead of the kids having to find a seat, they have to grab a mini pumpkin when the music stops. We used the song, "This is Halloween" from the Nightmare before Christmas, which is my kids' favourite Halloween song this year. Pictured are the two finalists battling it out for first place.

Snack time! I just served water as the drink, (I figured they'd be getting enough sweets that day) but made it festive in these cute pumpkin cups I got a the dollar store a couple years ago. I also have some Frankenstein ones, but they seem to be more popular with boys than girls.

And to eat, I served those yummy pumpkin muffins, but I'll call them cupcakes since I added that delicious frosting. They were gobbled up very quickly. Look, even my two-year-old is eating the healthy part! They really are that good.

It was a fun morning, and got us into the spirit of the day.

Children's Book Club - The Giving Tree

With school out for the summer, it meant that our big kids could join in the fun of Children's Book Club. My oldest wanted to be sure to have a turn to host and choose the book before he had to go back to school, so at our July meeting, he got his turn.

He chose a classic book: The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. It is the story of a tree who loves a boy and through his life, finds ways to give of herself to make him happy. Beautiful.

For our craft we made giving trees. We started with a sheet of blue construction paper, and glued on a brown trunk with a glue stick, then we used liquid glue and a Q-tip to paint on squares of green tissue paper to be the leaves.

We added the red apples by dipping our fingers into paint and dabbing them on the leaves.

The boy in the book ate apples from the tree, so apples was a pretty clear snack idea. But to make it a little more appealing to the crew, we dipped our apples in caramel dip. Oh so good! One of my favourite treats!

It was lots of fun to get together with the other kids and gave them a chance to get together, where in the summer, those can be hard to find.

Children's Book Club - The Marshmallow Incident

Can I just start out this post by saying, once again, how much I love Children's Book Club? Love it. A lot. We got the chance to hold it at our home this month, this time with my daughter being the hostess, and she was thrilled. She chose this book that is by the same people who did Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, another favourite. This one is a silly story about two neighbouring towns, the Town of Left and the Town of Right, who do not get along and who have a dotted yellow line running down the length of the boarder. Knights are given the charge of defending this line, and when one of the townspeople accidentally breaches the boarder, chaos ensues. I try to take my activities as closely as I can from the book, and this one had lots of great ones to use. The knights in the book arm their bows with marshmallows rather than arrows, so I made this target from poster board. (I used my set of mixing bowls to trace the sizes of circles)

My oldest son, just HAPPENS to have a marshmallow bow-and-arrow toy, (you can find them here if you are interested) and he agreed to let us borrow it while he was at school --- as long as I promised to leave up the target so he could do it when he came home! Deal.

The kids all got three shots with the weapon before we moved on.

Next we played marshmallow tic-tac-toe, but I didn't want to write X and O on them, so we played big vs little. This game was a hit and we played several rounds of it. When the game was over, we divided up the marshmallows and let the kids gobble them up.

Then we made some marshmallow sculptures using both large and small marshmallows, toothpicks, and shish kebab skewers. Most of the creations were fairly abstract, though we did have a definite snowman, but this little girl came up with this on her own. It is a giraffe. Aren't you totally impressed? I was.

There were lots of fun ways to go with this snack. We could make homemade marshmallows, smores, trail mix, marshmallow pops, marshmallow fluff on ice cream.... but in the end I went with these squares that I love and never make.

Mississippi Mud Bars

Brownie:

1 cup margarine (or butter)

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup cocoa

3 cups mini marshmallows

Icing:

1/2 cup margarine (or butter)

1/3 cup cocoa

1/2 cup evaporated milk

4 cups icing sugar

For brownies: cream margarine and sugar, add eggs and mix until blended. Gradually add dry ingredients and mix. Put into a greased 9x13" pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

Spread marshmallows on top of brownie in a single layer. Return to oven for 3-5 minutes (you want them to be quite puffy and stuck together without being too brown)

Cool 30 minutes.

Mix together icing and spread over marshmallow layer.

We also drank hot chocolate with marshmallows floating in our mugs. The world's coziest beverage.

This last game idea was really fun, but too complex for the ages of some of the kids we had attending.

So I set up the board and when the big kids came home, we played it.

It was like checkers, obviously, but instead of trying to have your pieces be the last on the board, the object of this game was to see who could eat the most marshmallows.

When you jumped your opponent, you got to eat his marshmallow! When you got a king, you got to eat your own marshmallow! It went really well. Super fun.

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!