The Magic Half- Meeting #4

Our fourth book The Magic Half was written by the same author as Ivy and Bean (which most of the girls have read in the past and loved).  It involves time travel between present day and 1935, twins, and some magic.

The host mama's daughter made this adorable sign to greet her guests.

The host mama served the girls a dinner of corndogs, tator tots, and juice boxes and had some other snacks out on the table.  Typically we have our discussion of the book as the girls eat.  

Most of the girls liked the book.  We had all thumbs up, and one thumbs down.  They discussed whether or not they would have gone back in time or not, and how the girls helped each other.  I know I say this every time, but the moms are always so impressed with how much the girls remember from the book, how their opinions differ (and they proudly share their views), and how much insight they have into the stories/characters.  They are really thinking about what they read.  I would have never imagined that the conversations would be so rich and interesting.

hands raised

lots of opinions ;)

For the activity, the girls wrote themselves letters for the future to be opened in 10 years (when they are 18 and seniors in high school....hard to imagine!).  Prior to the meeting, an email was sent to the moms asking for input from the girls about the trends for this school year.  I found most of the stuff by googling, and by just knowing what the girls are into.  We included those two printed pages in the letter, along with their letter to themselves.  Due to their ages, we felt that a free form letter would take more time/scaffolding from the adults, so we made a template for them to fill out about their interests now, and their predictions for the future.

 This has some good prompts for an open ended letter.  This was used as inspiration for our template.  I found it via Google from TeacherWeb.
Write a Letter to Your Future Self

Here is the template we created for the girls to fill out.
Letter to the Future template

Here is our trend sheet to be included with the letter.
Trends from 2013-2014 school year
(For whatever reason, the formatting is always getting screwy with this one.  It IS possible to fit it on two pages if you mess with it.  I don't know why it keeps changing on me).

The host mama also printed out two sheets of personalized stationary for each girl so they could add a real letter to themselves.  

As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.  
Here are the bottlecap images for The Magic Half.

Turtle In Paradise- meeting #3

eating dinner- we only had 5 girls this time as one of our girls was sick :(

 Our third book Turtle In Paradise takes place in the 1930s in Key West.  The girls are all fans of Jennifer L. Holm's graphic novel series BABYMOUSE so it was interesting to us all to see her versatility as an author.  Although nothing like BABYMOUSE, it is a great little read and a fun adventure story.  It was really interesting for the girls to read about a young girl's adventure during the depression era, and many references to comic strips, foods, places, and products were foreign to them.  I found a website called HELP READERS LOVE READING written by an amazing teacher who is doing his part to make reading more interesting to his students.  It takes the book chapter by chapter and shows pictures of actual places, maps, comic strips, and even YouTube videos that show Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, and Shirley Temple.  

For our discussion, I brought my laptop to the host mama's house and using an HDMI cord, was able to show this website on the TV screen.  We wove our general discussion questions into the presentation/discussion.  He even gives question prompts on each page asking the girls things like "In chapter 14 she compares Pork Chop and Beans to Laurel and Hardy.  What does she mean with that comparison?"  I can't say enough about this site.  Its awesome! 
Help Readers Love Reading- Turtle in Paradise pages

watching Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing

 

watching The Three Stooges

I'm always amazed at how much the girls remember from the books and their opinions about the story.  They are so savvy and think so much about the characters and their points of view.  I love the discussions with them.  


Instead of doing a craft this time, I thought it would be fun for the girls to do vintage inspired hairstyles using a headband.  I found this YouTube tutorial on how to stick your hair into an elastic headband to make it look like a messy updo.
Quick and Easy Vintage Hairstyle Headband tutorial

The girls watching the tutorial

Vintage inspired hairdos

so cute!

Because I like craft projects, I decided to make the headbands using fold over elastic and the following rosette tutorial.  But you could just as easily get some elastic headbands without embellishment and have just as much fun doing hairstyles.  

I used this tutorial to make the flowers for the headbands using old T-shirts:
T-shirt rosette tutorial
I thought this was a nice tie in to the book as well since the Depression era was all about stretching your dollar.  The original reduce, reuse, recycle.  

Fold over elastic is way more expensive and precut to 1 yd. lengths at Jo-Anns.  I got more for my money by ordering from Etsy.  
Shabby Rose Trim fold over elastic for headbands

For those who don't want to make rosettes but would like to trim out the headbands, they have affordable flowers available on ShabbyRoseTrim's store.

I've also noticed that a new trend in headbands is basically fold over elastic tied in a knot at one end.  Couldn't be easier to make that.  If you order your FOE from ShabbyRose, and cut and tie, you can recreate those for a lot less than the stores sell them for.

As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.  
Here are the bottlecap images for Turtle in Paradise.

Official book club stamp!

One of the suggestions from A Mighty Girl's book club organizing guide was to consider buying two copies of each book (so Mom and Daughter can both read without sharing the same copy).  After finishing that selection, one copy could be donated to a classroom library, community group, etc.  My daughter has the most fabulous teacher (shout out to Ms. Anastasia, if you are reading this!) and we are going to donate a copy of each book to her classroom library.  I also lost a dear friend last month who was a school secretary at a local elementary school and I want to donate books in her name as well.  She was an incredible champion of children's literacy.  She organized reading volunteers to come in from the community and help the kids read, set up reading challenges with neighboring schools, and even lead a project to paint the school's library to look like a bejeweled castle.  Amazing.  When she passed, the family requested donations be made to the school library in her honor.  So now the Girls With Opinions book club will participate in this effort as well.  Because donations to school libraries are complicated (they need to be a special binding, outfitted with barcodes, etc.), school libraries don't often accept book donations.  However, there are many teachers at the school who have classroom libraries that could use some new material.  I asked the school librarian to suggest a teacher (of an appropriate grade level for our books) that might like a set.  This will benefit the children of Sinclair and allow us to donate our special books ;)

I spent far too much time looking on Etsy for the perfect stamp to mark the donated books as well as the ones that will remain in our collection.  I had about 20 contenders, but I kept coming back to Magnolia Letter Arts.  After I placed the order I learned the shop owner and her mom are both reading teachers.  So cool.  

I don't know about anyone else, but I was all about finding treasures/secrets/secret clubs as a kid.  I can imagine in my mind's eye how fun it will be for the kids who pick one of our books off the shelf, to find this stamp on the inside cover:

I will bring the stamp and a stamp pad to each meeting and the girls can stamp their books if they wish.  All our books donated to classroom libraries will be stamped.  Sinclair school classroom library donations will be stamped along with a message "donated in honor of Terisa Billingsley." 

I so wish I could share this idea with Terisa.  I know she would giggle like a school girl about how cute and fun it will be for the kids to find inside.  

The Night Fairy- meeting #2

Our second book was THE NIGHT FAIRY by Laura Amy Schlitz.  This book was a hit.  Two girls gave it a thumbs to the side, but most gave it a thumbs up.  

We used our general book club discussion questions as well as some of these that came from a word document I found online at Indiana Library Federation's website:  

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Describe the life cycle of a fairy. 

2. Why did Flory, the night fairy, decide to be a day fairy?  What are her challenges?

3. Why do you think Flory is willing to help Skuggle get food?

4. What does Flory seem to admire about the hummingbird?  Why do you think this?

5. Discuss the growing relationship that develops between Flory and Skuggle.  How can you compare this to a friendship you developed?

6. Why do you think it might be bad luck to kill a fairy?

7. Flory developed several good friends.  Which friendships do you think will continue to grow?  Why do you think this?

The mom who hosted the meeting had a nice spread of veggies and fruit to snack on, chicken nuggets, and cupcakes with fairy cupcake toppers.  She found a fairy wall decal at the dollar store and put it on the wall to add some fairy magic to the room.  

After the book discussion, the girls made fairy houses.  In the story, Flory lives inside a bird house when she has to become a day fairy after the loss of her wings.  I found little paper mache bird houses at Hobby Lobby.  They are usually 99 cents but were on sale for 30% off making them roughly 70 cents each.   A word to the wise-  if you have a lot of girls in your club, make sure to buy them early.  I need six of them and the store I went to only had 5.  I got those, and then went back a week later and got the last one (this time there were only 2 at the store).  Don't wait until the last minute.  It seems they are never heavily stocked.

Paper mache bird house at HOBBY LOBBY

At the previous book club meeting, I let the girls look through my acrylic paint and had them choose the color they wanted for their fairy houses.  I wrote down their names and the color they chose.  Before this meeting I prepainted the houses so they were ready to go.  I used some sticky avery labels with their name on them to go around the loop at the top.  This kept the loop from getting stuck in the paint while painting and allowed me to know whose house was whose without writing on the actual house.

At the meeting, we put out foam stickers, jewels, sticky scrapbook letters, shells, puff balls, glue, and other things for them to decorate their houses. 

One mom brought some glue dots that really saved the day.  They worked on some of the items that would traditionally need hot glue, and the girls could use them themselves rather than ask an adult to hot glue for them.  

Hard at work

The finished products

 

a close up

 The host mama had one last craft- an acorn dessert.  The night fairies are 1 acorn high when they are born and at the end of the book, Flory is 2 acorns high.  So the girls made acorns from mini Nilla wafers, Hershey's kisses, and chocolate icing.  You use the chocolate icing to stick the hershey's kiss to the nilla wafer and then dab a little icing on the top to look like the stem. 

yummy acorns

I gave the bottle cap buttons out, and the girls added their NIGHT FAIRY button to their lanyard.  

IMAGES FOR THE NIGHT FAIRY BUTTONS

The second GIRLS WITH OPINIONS book club meeting was a success.  The girls are excited to read the next book TURTLE IN PARADISE for February's meeting.

Otherwise Known As Sheila The Great- meeting #1

After deciding on the book list, an email was sent to all the participants letting them know the meeting time, place, and book list.  We allowed a month to read the first book prior to the first meeting.  The first book we chose was Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great by Judy Blume.

The girls arrived at 6:30pm and ate hot dogs, fruit salad, and snacked on a veggie tray.  They brought their books along with them to discuss.  As they sat and ate, we had our discussion.

General book club discussion questions that we use as a guide for the discussion can be found here.  (I am trying to upload documents via Google Docs.  Lets see if this works ;)  Click the link below and hopefully it will take you to my Google doc.


GENERAL BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSIONS


Sheila is an interesting main character.  She is somewhat hard to like, bossy, and brags about herself all the time.  However, underneath the bravado, Sheila has many fears.  She is afraid of dogs, learning to swim, and many other things.  We talked about how sometimes when people are insecure they act like Sheila.  The girls were very talkative and shared many insights about the book.  They were all very shocked by the slumber party chapter.  In this chapter, Sheila and her friends make a "slam book" and write brutally honest things about each other.  The girls write very mean things to each other, and everyone's feelings are hurt.  We talked about how "honesty" is not always the best policy, and that we should work to build our friendships up rather than criticize and tear each other down.  

The activity we did after the discussion was to make a "sweet book."  I bought mini composition notebooks from Walgreens (99 cents each) and each girl wrote their name on the front of one.  They passed the books around and wrote something nice about the person in their book.  They all loved the activity and got to take their notebooks home.

As a silly snack, I made blue jello and put gummy lifesavers on top with sour patch kids inside the life savers (since Sheila is afraid to swim).  I should have taken more pictures, but here is a picture of the girls with the jello.

At the end of the activity, I passed out the first pin for their lanyard.  

Directions for bottle cap buttons to go on lanyards

Sheila images for button pins


After the official meeting is over, the girls like to play while the moms talk and drink wine. It was a great first meeting!

How to make bottle cap buttons for lanyards

I really loved the lanyard idea I found from this library Mother Daughter book club. You can see the picture of what they did here.

I bought each girl a lanyard (cheap ones from Oriental Trading) and added a name badge holder for them to write their name on.  Because button makers are expensive, I made bottle cap buttons instead.

HOW TO MAKE BOTTLE CAP BUTTONS FOR LANYARDS

Items needed: 
 bottle caps (without plastic liners, so unfortunately that means purchasing some at a craft store).
a 1 inch circle hole punch (craft store)
resin sticker circles (craft store)
glue sticks
E6000 craft glue (walmart)
flat pin backs (walmart...sewing area)

I grabbed JPGs of the book covers online and pasted them in a word document.  Sized them down to where the image looked to be about an inch in diameter.  You can see this fairly clearly by looking at the RULER on MS Word.  I used the snipping tool on Windows to crop out excessive parts of the image.  Just focusing on the important part of the image.  like Sheila's face, the fairy, the girls on the cover, etc.  

I am new to Blogger but I will try to figure out a way to upload the Word documents of these images so they are ready for use (and don't need resized or created from scratch).  

Hole punch out the image.   Use a glue stick to glue image inside the bottle cap.  Place resin sticker over image.  Flip bottle cap over.  Use E6000 glue to attach flat pin back to the back.  VOILA!  Cheap buttons.

How we chose our books and set up our group

Each month, the girls read the same book (and moms are encouraged to read it as well).  FYI, I have rediscovered my love of children's books.  Such fun stories and a lot less "trying too hard."  I have started reading other Mighty Girl books from the lists to think of titles for the future.  There are some truly fantastic books on the lists.  Have not found one yet that I haven't enjoyed.

The second Tuesday of every month, we meet at one of the girls' houses for a simple dinner, book discussion, and some sort of related craft or activity.  Initially me and another mom worked closely together to choose books, and agreed we would host between our two houses.  When the other girls/moms were invited, they were told they were welcome to host but it was not expected.  This seems to be a good way to do things since some moms in our group are about to remodel their homes etc.  

All of the girls are in the same grade and on similar reading levels.  We looked up each book's reading level to choose if it was a contender.  Our school uses ACCELERATED READER so we tried to keep the books in the range that would be acceptable for them using the website for AR Bookfinder.

Books were all chosen from A Mighty Girl's book lists. 

Our books for the first five meetings are:
1.  OTHERWISE KNOWN AS SHEILA THE GREAT by Judy Blume
2.  THE NIGHT FAIRY by Jennifer Schlitz
3.  TURTLE IN PARADISE by Jennifer L. Holm
4.  THE MAGIC HALF by Annie Barrows
5.  THE YEAR OF THE DOG by Grace Lin

We followed the guidelines from Mighty Girl about how many girls to invite.  We also were careful to choose girls of the same age so the books weren't too hard or too easy for club members to read.  Our group has 6 girls and 5 moms.  Because two girls are coming from another activity, it made sense to just make a simple dinner for all the girls.  

We sent an email to all the moms with the list of books with links to the Mighty Girl site.  Many books can be found at Half Price Books, or the library, as a lot are Newberry winners, etc.  However, if ordering from Amazon, we suggested they click through the Mighty girl like so they get a portion of the sale.  (I have no connection to the site other than being a huge fan for all their work at putting together the lists, etc.  I probably sound like a sales person, but wow, what a great resource!) 


We set the first meeting date a month away and chose the second Tuesday of each month as our meeting date.