Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Book #12: Polar Bears Past Bedtime

Their magic tree house takes Jack and Annie to the Arctic...where they get on thin ice with a polar bear.

Well, it's hard to believe we've done twelve months of Magic Tree House, but we have. For our twelfth meeting, we were lucky enough to have Bronwyn Llewellyn of the World Wildlife Fund come from Washington DC to talk to us about polar bears and polar bear conservation. She showed us a plastic-cast of a full size polar bear head, real polar bear claws, and a bunch of other cool stuff, along with a Powerpoint featuring photos of some of the work done by the WWF to help track and save the recently endangered polar bear. She told us about some of the things that are currently harming the polar bear and we learned what we can do to help, including how we can participate in Earth Hour . At the end everyone received stickers, WWF decals, and pens.

Join us on Thursday, December 11th for the next Magic Tree House Book Club, featuring book #13, Vacation Under the Volcano. Don't forget to register!

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Book #11: Lions at Lunchtime

The Magic Tree House takes Jack and Annie to Africa to solve another riddle!

For this meeting, I made a crossword puzzle using Discovery's Puzzlemaker website. We all did the crossword (clues and answers derived from the book!) together, and then some chose to do a word search also created with Puzzlemaker.

The craft we did was a clothespin lion. The idea was derived from this craft idea for lion and lamb note holders.

All of the supplies we used are available at your local craft store, and they were:

- straight, non-clipping clothespins (2 per kid)
- heavy stock paper out of which I pre-cut lion heads (1 per kid)
- googly eyes (2 per kid)
- colored pencils and markers (to draw in faces)
- yellow yarn (to create mane)
-glue (to put it all together)

1. Draw a face on the lion.
2. Glue on googly eyes and mane if you wish.
3. Glue the clothespins on to the back of the lion head so that the "legs" of the clothespins are lined up and the lion could reasonably be expected to stand.

Join us on Thursday, November 13th for the next Magic Tree House Book Club, featuring book #12, Polar Bears Past Bedtime. Don't forget to register!