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!

Good Luck Bear

Here's a pick of mine for a fun St Patrick's Day read. It's called Good Luck Bear by Greg Foley. It's one of four Bear books. The illustrations are beautiful, simple and refreshingly charming. In this book we find bear as he discovers a three leaf clover. His friend mouse shares that if he can find a four leaf clover it means he's lucky, so the search begins. Friends come by with of course their own opinions on the matter but bear sticks with his search. The end of the story isn't about finding luck but the treasure of a good friend. I love the dedication of this book, it's 'for all those who find luck in the unexpected'.

Other books in the series include: Thank You Bear, Don't Worry Bear and I Miss You Mouse.



We don't own this book and we didn't pick up our copy to enjoy from the library. We read it online through the We Give Books.org site by The Penguin Group and The Pearson Foundation. If you haven't already heard of this program please go by and check it out. It's as simple as registering at the site and then sharing some great reads with your kids. They have books for babies through teens to choose from. For each book you read they will give a book to a campaign of your choice. There are several to choose from including Hope for Haiti, NEA - Books Across America, Jumpstart for Young Children to name just a few you can select. My two love reading books online and it is always a favorite activity when I suggest it.