Poppins Book Nook- Traveling With Stanley

The theme for the month of June for the Poppins Book Nook was travel/transportation.  It took me a while to figure out what we could do to go along with that theme.  One day while I was at Barnes and Noble I looked at some Flat Stanley books and knew that would be the perfect book for the theme.

We have never read any of the Flat Stanley books, so we picked “Flat Stanley His Original Adventure” by Jeff Brown.  We also bought one of the chapter books to read too.  After we read the book, Hailey made her own Flat Stanley.

I found a template of Flat Stanley on Commerce Library Kids and printed it out for Hailey to color.

When she finished coloring him, I went on facebook with this picture and asked our friends and family if Stanley could come and visit them.  Thanks to so many people offering to help us, Stanley has a very busy summer lined up 🙂

His first adventure was with us, we had a wedding to attend.  Hailey and Stanley were all ready to go.

If you look closely you can see Stanley behind the seat belt, watching a movie with Hailey.

Stanley was very good at the reception- he sat in the chair and watched all the people 🙂

After the wedding Stanley left on his next adventure.  Hailey’s Aunt Ellie took him to visit Delaware and Washington DC.

Stanley went to physical therapy with Aunt Ellie.  It looks like he had fun and I’m sure he learned a lot 🙂

Stanley had quite the adventure in Washington DC and was able to see the Jefferson Memorial and Tidal Basin.

He also stopped for a visit at the Lincoln Memorial.

Stanley also went on a bike ride (and wore his helmet, of course!) to visit the University of Delaware.
He sure has been busy with Aunt Ellie, and looks like he has really enjoyed himself!

I ordered a map of the United States for us to use to mark off the different places that Stanley visits.  We haven’t received it yet, but when we get it we will add the fun places that Stanley has gone.

Stanley is headed off to Utah next and has a lot of fun filled adventures coming up this summer, so make sure you stop back to see what he’s up to.

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Poppins Book Nook- Dinosaur Fun!

I am so excited to be a part of the Poppins Book Nook!  This is our first month joining in the fun.  Each month a different theme is picked and then everyone picks a book that relates to the theme and then creates some activities to go along with the book.

We picked “Dinosaurs Before Dark” by Mary Pope Osborne for our book.  Hailey has just recently started reading chapter books, so she has been really excited that she can read these books on her own.  If you haven’t read this book before- it’s a series about a brother and sister, Jack and Annie.  This is the first book in the series where Jack and Annie discover a tree house.  There are lots of books in the tree house and when Jack is looking at one about dinosaurs he wishes that he could see a real pteranodon.  Suddenly Jack and Annie end up in the days of dinosaurs and of course, an adventure begins.  I love the Magic Tree House series- they are fun, fictional stories but with lots of opportunities for learning about history added in.

We decided to make a dinosaur diorama for our project:

A shoebox just wasn’t going to cut it for our plans 🙂 so we used a regular box instead.  Hailey got to work painting her box.

She added lots of different props.

Some dinosaur eggs

A volcano

She put a stream and a little pond in, painted some grass on, added some cotton clouds, put some sand and trees in.  And of course, the dinosaurs.

Hailey’s completed diorama- she did a great job!

We also made a paper mache dinosaur:

First the dinosaur was formed using aluminum foil.  There is newspaper stuffed inside his head and body to help keep its shape.

The dinosaur all covered in paper mache.
For paper mache, we use a 2:1 ratio of water to flour, and I added a little white glue to the mixture too.  It takes a couple of days to be completely dry.

Once the dinosaur was dry it was time to paint him.  We did a little research about the color of dinosaurs- some scientists believe that dinosaurs were gray, dark green, brown, etc. so that they could blend in with their surroundings.  Other scientists believe that dinosaurs were colorful and even had pretty, bright spots in order to attract a mate.  Hailey decided she agrees with the scientists who think the dinosaurs were colorful, so she painted him purple.

She added some pink and blue spots.

The completed paper mache dinosaur.

We learned a lot about volcanos too.  I cut out some dinosaur footprints and wrote some volcano related vocabulary words on them (lava, eruption, magma, crust, mantle, outer core, inner core, pumice, tuff, and pahoehoe).  Hailey wrote the definitions on the backs of the footprints.

Then she spread them around the living room.  I made some noises and Hailey and Hunter danced around on the footprints.

When I stopped making the noise, Hailey read the definition of the word.  The goal, of course, being that once we play it enough she will remember the definitions.

We did a bunch of fun activities all about dinosaurs so it was really hard to pick what to share!  So, here are some of the other activities we did last week too:

  Hailey made some dinosaur bones.

She created a dinosaur fossil.

One of her favorite activities was setting off a volcano she made.

She made this pretty dinosaur oil pastel painting.

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Check out some (or all!) of the other bloggers participating in Poppins Book Nook:

If you have your own fun activity to link up, you can that here: