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.