Monday, June 25, 2012

Mom & Me Book Club: "The Monster at the end of this Book"


We started hosting a Mom & Me book club after discovering this Mommy & Me Book Club website. They have such great ideas! We meet every other week for our book club and we follow the same the general pattern of circle-time, crafts, and activities as they do on the website. For this weeks Mom & Me Book club we picked the book, "The Monster at the end of this Book" by Jon Stone.  

Gathering Activity:
Keeping in the theme with Monsters we decided to have the kids make their own creative little monsters out of play-doh. They each got craft sticks, goggly eyes and beads to use as arms eyes or teeth. I saw this idea on this website. It was really fun to see what things they came up with. 




Circle Time:
During circle time we sang, "here we are together at Mommy & Me" and we sang through every child's name in attendance. Then we sang the "ABC's." (When we got to the letter of a child in the room they raised their hand and shouted their letter) Next we counted from 1-10 and back again from 10-1. Then we sang "If you're a Monster and you know it" (to the tune of if you are happy and you know it, but with monster things: growling, stomping...) Then we read the book, "The Monster at the end of this Book." We ended circle time by singing, "shake my sillies out" with the last line being, "tip toe my sillies out" as we tip toed over to the table for an activity.

Activity:
For our first activity we did a "don't turn the page" activity. We handed out several board books and let the children, using yarn, blocks and straws, attempt to make it so they could not turn the page. A few of the older kids actually accomplished this and everyone else just had a lot of fun knocking blocks onto the ground.
 


Activity:
For our next activity we played a version of "button button, who's got the button." Instead of a button we had a little toy monster that the kids passed around in a circle, while one kid left the circle and closed their eyes. We played "The Monster Mash" music as they passed the monster around and then paused the music. When the music stopped everyone put their hands behind their backs, including the person with the toy monster. Then the person who had their eyes closed got to come over and guess who had the monster and repeat. 

Craft: 
For a craft we made Grover monster faces. We found out how to make them at this website. We used paper plates as the base. We let the kids color a mouth with crayons and then they glued on shredded blue construction paper. Then glued on eyes and a nose on top of that. 




Show & Tell:
Each child also brings an item related to the book (if they can) for show and tell. They stand up in front of everyone, say their name, show what they brought and tell the group why is is related to the book or why it is special to them. 


Snack/lunch:

We made these fun monster sandwiches that we found at this website. We choose to use the black olives however, knowing that most kids would not eat the green ones. 


 And we also had some "lumber" pretzels, "rope" twizzlers, and "bricks" graham crackers. And many other fruits and fun snacks as well.




1 comment:

Sherry Ellsworth said...

I just saw this book at a store this weekend and almost bought it! it was one of my favorites growing up. They had it in the waiting room where we got our eat tubes and had all of those appointments as kids. Ha! Wish i loved closer so i could join in the fun! Do you do this once a month? Maybe when i get back to Texas i'll join ya'll and make this my excuse to come see you more often. I miss being by family!