Picture Book Time

One of my new resolutions is to regularly fit in picture book time with my younger ones. By younger I mean Michaelangelo, Princess and Jelly Bean and of course Jack Jack. For some reason snuggling up with picture books once a great mainstay of our life has fallen by the wayside. I am determined to re-instate this time where it belongs – daily. To this end I am going to keep myself accountable by recording on the sidebar just what we have read.

On the first day of ‘kick of’ I shared with Princess that we were going to pick a group of books around a theme and enjoy them. She had the honour of choosing our first theme, she choose ‘Pumpkins’. Off our shelf she grabbed Farmer Pelz’s Pumpkins by a favourite and prolific Australian author Colin Thiele.
Farmer Pelz enters his famous pumpkins into a contest and wins, he is then contracted to take a load of pumpkins to the sponsors. The town louts tinker with his car whilst he stops to have a cuppa with a neighbour. When he drives off the car runs backwards down the hill and he loses the load of pumpkins, making a mess of the town. The louts are caught and Farmer Pelz is a town hero.

We also enjoyed ‘County Fair’ a ‘First Little House Book’ by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The story of Almanzo and his family’s successful day at the county fair, but particularly for Almanzo whose extremely large pumpkin wins first prize.

Inspired by these stories we then decided to make Pumpkin Scones for afternoon tea and Pumpkin Soup for tea. As I headed to the kitchen I mentioned to Michaelangelo and Princess that we would find a picture on the internet of pumpkins later to colour in.

I was rather impressed to re-enter the room a short time later to discover that my 8 and 6 year olds had successfully googled ‘images’ for pumpkins+coloring(using the books to check their spelling), clarified the images and copied and pasted the images into Word and were in the midst of sizing them so they could fit a couple per page and print them out! I have never shown them how to do this they had just seen me do it.

A very successful time, and all rather spontaneous. However I know for it to happen regularly I need to plan a little more, so stay tuned:)