Mommy and Me Book Club - Alien Encounter

When I saw a post about starting a Mommy and Me Book Club on ToddlerApproved.com, I thought this would be a great idea for my local MOMS Club. I love the idea of pairing a book with a related craft, and themed food is always fun. I also thought it would be a good idea to do some kind of movement activity, since sitting and listening to a book, then sitting and doing a craft is a lot of sitting for a young kid.

I did a search on Pinterest for “book and craft” combinations and ended up finding this Build Your Own Alien play dough project that was perfect. This was paired with a book called Aliens Love Underpants, but I couldn’t think of an effective way to provide a selection of ‘underpants’ for a large group of kids. Laminating is expensive and then I would have to cut them all out by hand. So, I looked for other alien books and found these two at my local library.

The illustrations in these books are fantastic and I loved the stories. Because much of the story is actually in the pictures, they’re really best for reading at a one-on-one level to a child so they can study the pictures. But to make sure that the children understood what was going on, I pointed out different things in the illustrations, and talked to the group: “What’s he doing?”, “What’s going on here?”, “What are they seeing up in the sky?”, “Look at the crazy ice cream,” etc.

I'm always looking for an excuse to make cookies, so I created these little dudes using a fire hydrant cutter and an upside-down Mickey head with the top of the ears cut off.

My inspiration came from these two cookies, the left from Lila Loa and the right from Collaboration with Cakes.

The items I provided for the “invitation to create” mostly came from the Dollar Tree. A pack of different sized googly eyes, metallic pipe cleaners, tiny rattles from the party favor section (they looked like alien heads to me), and hinged ball-knockers (okay that sounds really, umm, anyway). For the ball-knockers, I popped the ball part off the handle and provided the pieces separately. My friend had given me some Mardi Gras beads left over from a party, so I cut those up. Then I had some wooden beads that had come off an abacus that I bought in the dollar section at Target a while back. It broke after a time and I kept the beads for future use.  The sectioned trays are also from the Dollar Tree, I bought them two years ago for my daughter’s second birthday party when I had a taco bar. They were the perfect alien green.

I made the play dough with this recipe from Tinker Lab. I like to add the coloring in the pan while the mixture is still liquid. I find that adding the color later results in a sticky dough, so I’ve always done it this way. I used Americolor Electric Green.

For the movement activity, I came up with a sort of relay that had the kids running, criss-crossing my backyard to different stations. Though I’ve numbered the stations here to make things clear, they did not actually have numbers when we did it. The idea was that the kids were searching for moon rocks, but first they had to pick up space junk and then fix their rocket ship.

1. Station 1 - This station had a pile of “space junk” (stuff that came out of my recycle bin). Things like plastic containers, cardboard boxes and magazines or catalogs work best because they are heavy enough that they won’t blow away in a breeze.  Also they should be clean, of course.
2. Station 2 – Two brown paper grocery bags to deposit the space junk in.
3. Station 3 – Two cookie sheets with paper cut-outs of various pieces of hardware and spare parts. These all had tape on the back of them and were lightly stuck to the cookie sheet so they wouldn’t fly away, but the kids could easily pick them off without pulling the tape off the back.
   
4. Station 4 – A poster of a rocket ship that the kids had to stick the hardware on.  I used a free web tool called Block Posters for this.  All you do is upload a picture or graphic, tell it how many pages wide you want it to be, and it will chop the graphic into blocks and output a .pdf file that you can print.  Then you just trim off the white borders and tape the pieces together.
5. Station 5 - A pile of "moon rocks", plastic Easter eggs filled with candy and wrapped in aluminum foil.

So, the kids had to run over to the space junk and grab a couple, run to the bags and toss the space junk in, run to the spare parts and grab one, run to the rocket ship and put it on, and then run to get a moon rock and then give it to their mom.  Then they did it over and over again until all the moon rocks were gone, and those kiddos were out of breath!

In hindsight, one rule I should have explained more carefully is that each kid was only allowed to take one moon rock at a time, because some of the kids were grabbing handfuls at a time, and one kid ended up with a ton while other kids only had a couple.  The kids didn't seem to notice, but to make it fair for each kid, I would limit the number of rocks per kid so that they all end up with the same amount.  You can use the moms to enforce this by telling them that the kids are only allowed to have so many.

We've already had one mom volunteer to host Mommy and Me Book Club next month, so I can't wait to see what we are going to be doing!