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.
