Our Literary Summer: Week 1 - Mouse's First Summer

This summer, I decided to focus on something that is hugely popular in our family - books!  My husband and I are both avid readers and our children literally have books in every room.  If you sit down in my house, you will very soon find yourself with a child in your lap handing you book after book.

A couple of weeks ago, that child happened to be Monkey and that book happened to be Mouse's First Summer by Lauren Thompson.  As I was reading, activity ideas flooded my mind and I decided to throw out the old lesson plans and start fresh with a book per week and lots of fun to go along with each book!

Of course, we had to start with Mouse's First Summer since it was my original inspiration.  Here is a look at our week:

In the story, Mouse tastes some "drippy, sweet, wet, red watermelon" and enjoys a tasty glass of lemonade, so we started by exploring our very own watermelon.  The book uses excellent descriptive words, so we just talked about the watermelon and the kiddos decided it was smooth, hard, green, striped and round on the outside and pink, red, juicy and yummy on the inside.  We sliced the watermelon and whipped up some tasty dip to accompany it and then got to work juicing lemons.  Nope, we didn't use bottled lemon juice, we didn't even use the fancy-shmancy juicer, we did it by hand, the old fashioned way, and our lemonade was delicious!

We even made our own Watermelon Art with real watermelon seeds.

The children loved all of our watermelon-themed centers used throughout the week:  

Watermelon Play Dough

and with added seeds!

Watermelon Sensory Bag inspired by Teach Preschool

 Watermelon Water Bead Sensory Box

Even more fun on the light table!

We also sang and danced to The Watermelon Song by Billy Jonas.  The kiddos love this one, lots of movement and lots of sillies with some learning stuck in the middle.

Later in the story, Mouse is on a picnic and there are some munching ants happily moving about, so we created our own Fingerprint Ants along with some shredded 'grass' and we enjoyed a tasty snack of Ants on a Log.

We explored the sky right along with Mouse by letting the sun make a project for us using Sunprint paper.  Naturally, I neglected to get photos of this fun project, but you can read all about it HERE!!

We decorated some kites and one of my little guys made his all orange, just like in the story!!

Our last day of activities was all about fireworks!

 We started with Fireworks in a Bag.  We put about a tablespoon of baking soda in a little paper towel packet.  Next, we added some food coloring.  Then we added about 1/2 c. of vinegar and sealed the bag.  The last step is observe!

If you are lucky enough not to get a bag with a hole in it, you should end up with a satisfactory POP! and even some color spilling out of your bag.  We had a few trial runs before success, but hey, that's what science is all about, right?

We finished with Balloon Print Fireworks, which is pretty self-explanatory, they came out great and then I washed the balloons and the kiddos had a blast with them for the rest of the day!

Hooray for SUMMER!