Themed Parties

Hunger Heroes: A Food Drive Play Date

2012

Last week we went orange for No Kid Hungry by inviting our friends to the park for a Hunger Heroes play date! Everyone was asked to bring food donations for our local food bank and we were so excited that over 30 of our little friends showed up with enough food to fill 3 large boxes.

Each of the Hunger Heroes received a “today I helped end childhood hunger” sticker and an orange super hero cape to signify their good deed. The kids also drew pictures on paper plates to be given out with the food donations, a task they did with great thoughtfulness and compassion.

It was their attitudes, not just their actions, that turned the children into Hunger Heroes last week.

photo courtesy of Best part photography

I was thrilled to have two of our local bloggers join the Moms Fighting Hunger cause. Corey from the Best part blog and Asmita from Compulsive Foodie not only attended the event, but jumped in to help! Corey is also a photographer and volunteered to photograph the event and Asmita is contributing a a future Moms Fighting Hunger project so stayed tuned for more info.

If you and your family would like to get involved with the fight against hunger the Moms Fighting Hunger bloggers have got you covered:

Want to download the awesome printable with the Mother Teresa quote above? Check out Raising Figure Skaters.
Need tips on How to Host a Food Drive? Curly Birds is the place to go.
Want to know about Feeding with Reading? Childhood Beckons has all the info you need.
Need even more inspiration? Then you must watch Every Can Counts at Kids Stuff World!

Filed Under: Food, Special Days, Themed Parties Tagged With: Hunger Heroes Play Date, kindergarten, Moms Fighting Hunger, No Kid Hungry, paper plate messages, preschool, school age, the Best part photography, volunteer activities

Camping Themed Kids Activities

2012

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Is anyone else shocked at how fast this summer is flying by? It seems like the last day of school was just yesterday. One of our favorite activities this summer has been doing Camp Whamma Jamma with some of our friends. The mom had asked me if we wanted to participate in a mom-run home summer camp and I couldn’t say yes fast enough! We picked a couple days in the month of July and took turns hosting a themed camp.

I had the first session and did a camping theme. So fun and easy to pull together!

The first camping activity was decorating sit upons! Originally, I was going to have them make the sit upons themselves, but I had so many other activities we weren’t going to have enough time so I put them together the night before. I cut a large repositionable contact paper rectangle for each kid and filled them with crumpled magazine pages. Then before I sealed them I stuck a short ribbon into the open side for a handle. The kids then personalized their sit upons with crayons and stickers.

Then it was time for some stories. We read Maisy Goes Camping by Lucy Cousins and When We Go Camping by Margriet Ruurs. The kids especially loved When We Go Camping, the illustrations are amazing and each page contains a footprint for the reader to identify. We highly recommend it!

Next up was a “hike” in the backyard! We gathered lots of fun things like rocks and leaves. Everyone got to pick a special rock to turn into a pet.

And then made crayon rubbings of some of the leaves they found!

For a snack we had trail mix and s’mores! Since our campfire was made out of tissue paper, I roasted the marshmallows for everyone on the gas stove. You can’t go camping, even pretend camping, without roasting marshmallows!

After a snack we went outside for archery practice! I found the coolest tutorial on I Can Teach My Child for making mini bows and arrows. You have to check it out! We had so much fun with them–once we figured out which way to hold the bow!

After archery the kids had free play time and enjoyed trying out the cardboard tent and campfire until they got too hot and headed inside to cool off. After a little bit of unstructured time we gathered back together for another story and craft. We read Eric Carle’s The Very Lonely Firefly and talked about what would happen if you were to catch a firefly in a jar.

Then we made our own inspired by the ones from Come Together Kids. We followed Laura’s directions for glow in the dark firefly jars except we used our fingers to make the bugs instead of a paintbrush. Then we tried them out! The kids went into a dark room with their glowing jars and “caught” glowing bugs (purchased from the dollar section at Target) that I had hid all over the room.

After a busy morning the kids were ready to take their bag lunches and their sit upons out to the campfire for lunch! Definitely a fun (and sunny) camping filled day! What fun camping activities have you tried? We’d love some more ideas!

Linking up to these great blogs:

Filed Under: Learning Activities, Reading, Themed Parties Tagged With: art, camping, cooking, crafts, kids crafts, kindergarten, paint, preschool, pretend play, reading activities, reading games, school age, snack, summer

Letter P Pancake Themed Activities

2012

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After school got out for the summer my oldest went to camp each morning for a week. The younger two were bummed they were missing out on all the fun so we invited some of their friends over for a pancake themed play date!

Everyone wore their pajamas to get into the letter P and pancake spirit and we started off the fun by making pink pig noses! (Did you catch all the P words so far?) We talked about the sounds animals make and how letters make sounds too. Instead of oinking they pretended that they were pigs that said, “Puh!” and had lots of fun puh-ing around the pretend pig pen.

*Note: I wrote puh with the uh because it was the closest I could get to spelling the P sound. When making the P sound you actually want to make sure your jaw is dropping and there isn’t any “uh” sound at all. It’s more of a lip popping sound and motion. Teaching kids the correct way to make each sound helps them as they start to put the sounds together to read and spell words.*

After being little piggies they were ready to read! We read If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff which is one of our favorites. The kids love to predict what the pig will ask for next and as you can tell by the title there are lots of P words to play with. After we read and discussed the story the kids got to put their noses back on and “puh” when we found the letter P.

If You Give a Pig a Pancake is a circular story, the plot line literally comes full circle, so what better way to sequence the story events than on a round pancake! They all did a fantastic job of recalling story events and then placing them in order–such a great book to use to work on these skills.

By this time the kids were ready for a snack so we painted some pancakes to eat! My husband premade a bunch of pancakes for the kids the night before and they used a mix of food coloring and 2% milk to paint designs on the cold pancakes.

Then I put them in the oven to warm and dry the designs while they kept painting. I love how fun the colors look on the pancakes–we usually only paint toast and I can’t wait to do this again. It would be so much fun for a birthday breakfast!

While they ate the 4 year olds played with our word chunk sliders. The first word the “an” chunk slider makes is pan so it was perfect to start with. They had fun sliding the stick to make and read the different “an” words and came back to them later to work with other word families too.

Then it was time for some games! They had a blast with the pancake relay.

But the pancake toss was much more fun for me as a spectator! It was hysterical to watch them practice their gross motor skills by trying to toss and catch the pancakes. There were definitely a lot of giggles during this one!

After some games we practiced writing Ps a couple ways and then turned the letter P into a picture! The 2 and 3 year olds made the P into anything they wanted and the 4 year olds turned their Ps into pictures of P words–including a great big pizza!

Then it was lunch time! More pancakes, of course. Each of them got a pancake pig, scrambled eggs, OJ, berries, syrup, and even some mini-chocolate chip pancakes!