Top Five Fridays - Joost Elffers and Saxton Freymann

I haven't done a top five Friday in a while and I thought I'd revisit it with the creative duo, Joost Elffers and Saxton Freymann. They have created a wonderfully imaginative series of books for young and old readers alike. They are artists and sculptures with an interesting medium of food. The books are full of color, bold, funny and just grab my kids attention and interest.






1. One Lonely Seahorse - a fun counting book about friendship





2. Gus and Button - Living in a dull, colorless world we find Gus and Button. One day something green blows in from a storm and their adventure begins opening up a whole new world. I love these storyline books and hope this pair collaborates on some more.





3. Food for Thought - explores early learning concepts like colors, shapes, letters and numbers with a food twist









4. How are you Peeling? - My two love taking turns telling me what the different foods were feeling based on their expressions.






5. Do You Love Me? by Joost Elffers - Moves away from foods but still follows the same graphic layout and bold color compositions. Sweet, simple, reassuring read about how much parents love their little ones.




What are your favorites?

I'm Reading...your Blogs!

So this is my second post in this series and I originally thought I'd only be posting about the great books I've found by you sharing on your sites. But today I'm going to change that format and share some fun St. Patrick's Day activities that I've found in my blog reading. We've already rolled up our sleeves and done a few of these ourselves.

So first up I loved this rainbow xylophone that was done over at Meet the Dubiens. And here's our attempt:



We didn't have the oh so cute honey dipper sticks but we did have some drum sticks from the kids' musical instruments. I think a spoon would also work just fine. We paired this activity up with one of the St. Patrick's books we picked up from the library. It's an illustrated children's picture book to the lyrics of the song 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' and came with a music CD of that song preformed by Judy Collins. There are actually three songs on the CD. The book is titled, Over the Rainbow and is illustrated by Eric Puybaret. I loved that the book had that musical tie into the musical activity.
I'm letting the kids enjoy it here for a little while but before I dump the rainbow water, I plan to level them out and do this fun experiment of creating a rainbow in a glass. The experiment can be found at scifun.org.

Next up is this fun felt shamrock matching game from Along the Way. I had a limited colors of felt to choose from in my stock when I created my version but I still think they turned out fun.



I loved the craft that Helping Little Hands did with Good Luck Bear by Greg Foley. We did a scaled back version. Smaller clovers in a picture field with our blessings that make us feel lucky. I'm always looking for crafts that incorporate being thankful, counting our blessings and topics along those lines. Here's the craft from Helping Little Hands.

And here's our scaled back version. I didn't have two contrasting colors of green so I dug through my scrap book papers to see what I could find and we used pastels to color in the grass.

Last up is St. Patrick's Day play dough cookies, which I'm saving to do on St Patrick's Day as one of our activities. This comes from Amanda's Cooking. Since I'm saving this for Thursday I don't have any pictures of our attempt at this but here's one from Amanda's site.
Aren't the fun and amazingly beautiful! I'm so excited to try these!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

My Heart is like a Zoo

My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall is a fun book we picked up for this Valentine's Day. The bold illustrations are of different zoo animals made up of collage hearts. There's a cute rhyme that shares how one's heart is as 'snappy as a crab', 'cool as a penguin' and 'jumpy as a frog'. Its a clever fun book that also has some funny comparisons to animal traits. My two giggled several times throughout this read. We did a our own 'heart' animals for a craft to go along with this read. I let the kids pick two out each and I got busy cutting out hearts. Then they helped glue them all together. They loved this and they picked out two more to do the next day! For those who it might not be apparent to, we have a moose, a crab, an owl and a bear.



A Mommy's Adventure stART

The Little Yellow Leaf

The Little Yellow Leaf by Carin Berger, is one of our favorite Fall reads. It is a simple beautifully written and equally beautifully illustrated children's book. The story is about a little yellow leaf that just isn't ready to drop from its branch. It hangs on as all the other leaves fall to the ground until it is the last leaf on the tree. This touches not just on the changing of the seasons but on how change in general can be hard. Berger is an award-winning designer and illustrator and really delivers some unique illustrations in this book. The striking illustrations are created using collage, making it a great book to pair with a study on collage art.