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!

The Marvelous Toy

I thought I'd share a fun book about a toy today. As my two are enjoying their new Christmas toys this book came to mind, it's called The Marvelous Toy by Tom Paxton and illustrated by Steve Cox. It's based on a song written by American Folk singer and writer, Tom Paxton. See Youtube clip below to hear this song preformed by Peter, Paul and Mary. The illustrations are bold, bright and whimsical as they capture these lyrics beautifully into a picture book. The story is about a little boy who receives an unusual gift from his father. He is amazed by this toy though not quite sure what it is. The chorus lines go: "It went zip! when it moved/And bop! when it stopped/And whirr! when it stood still./I never knew just what it was,/And I guess I never will." The story ends as the now grown boy passes on the marvelous toy to his own son. It's a great book to share some delight and wonder with your young readers.