The summer is coming to a close. We've been reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and today we had our last Bookworms meeting to discuss it!
"I've got a golden ticket..." That song has been stuck in my head for weeks, ever since I made these little invitations to hand out to the neighborhood moms.
Since we had such a big age range (from toddlers Juno's age to almost 11-year-olds), I decided to do something a little different. Instead of sitting in a circle and discussing the book like a traditional book club, I set up a couple different stations where the kids could do activities inspired by the book. I included a few discussion questions at each station to guide the conversations.
The Inventing Room
Our "Inventing Room" was a play-dough station. I was inspired by this awesome blog post about Willy Wonka play dough. I made a few different kinds of play dough and provided beads, buttons, jingle bells, pompoms, and star confetti to help the kids create their own kind of candy. I also set out little plastic bags and tags so the kids could write a description of their candy and take it home with them :)
Hard at work!
This is our cute neighbor, Dylan. He made bacon flavored candy--he rolled a pink ball and then added beads for eyes and a button for a snout! So creative!
Juno loved this station. She stayed here pretty much the whole party--at least until she realized there was unattended candy on the deck!
The Juicing Room
I put discussion questions in blue balloons and invited the kids to pop them and answer the questions. Most of the questions were simple things like "Who was your favorite character?" or "Which child do you think you are most like?"
The Fizzy Lifting Room
I didn't get a picture of this station, but I set up our bubble machine, inspired by the fizzy lifting drinks that Charlie and Grandpa Joe drank. This station had questions about rule-breaking. Have you ever broken a rule and later wish you hadn't?
The kids had fun rotating through the stations and then digging in to the candy and running around the yard. Here's Tempe and Helena with their twins, Blake and Luke, who are the cutest identical twins ever. Tempe can already tell them apart!
Bookworms was a great experience this year--I can't wait to do it again next summer!
4 comments:
I love all your party ideas! You are the master at party throwing!
This is fantastic, you should teach preschool. You'd be great at it :)
It was so fun - thanks for making lots of fun summer memories for the neighborhood!
I've loved doing it this summer--it will have to become an annual tradition!
Claire, I would LOVE to teach preschool. Maybe someday I will!
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