Trying to decide what I wanted to write about for the TOS Crew's 5 Days of Series was pretty easy. We love to read! Reading to my kids, it is my favorite part of our day. So, for the next five days I will be writing about Bringing Books to Life.
To start with, I thought it would be fun to come up with some fun ways to incorporate food and cooking into the books we've read. Everyone likes to eat, right? I know my kids like to eat and they ALWAYS want to be in the kitchen, so these are mostly ideas to do WITH the kids in the kitchen after you've read a book.
Most of our family read alouds seem to fall in the historical fiction category. These books are very easy to cook or bake something to tie into the time period. For instance, if you've just finished reading Detectives in Togas a Roman Feast would be the ideal way to tie food into the book. We just finished reading The Door in the Wall so a Medieval Feast is in our near future. Next year we read about Pilgrims and the Mayflower we will eat some the things they ate.
You can bake a cake to represent your book. Our library actually has a contest every year called Devour a Book. You can make a cake that looks like the cover of your book or just a cake that represents it.
If your book takes place in another country eat the food that they eat! My girls just finished up Treasures of the Snow with their book club. Since it takes place in Switzerland, for the last meeting they had Swiss chocolate and Swiss cheese fondue, among other things. They loved this!
Picture books are fun to cook or bake from, here are a few ideas:
Green Eggs and Ham - make green eggs and ham! (as much as I am opposed to food coloring I would splurge for this one)
Blueberries for Sal - make blueberry syrup, pancakes, muffins or cobbler
Diary of a Worm - make a dirt cake
The Snowy Day or any other snow related book - make a marshmallow snowman
Cloudy with a Change of Meatballs - make homemade meatballs and have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish - eat goldfish snacks. Let the kids help you make fish sticks for lunch or fish fillets for dinner.
How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World - make APPLE PIE!
You get the picture, there are lots of things that you can do to tie food into a book. Be creative and involve your kids!
I am by no means saying that things should be done daily or even weekly. They should not be an added burden, just something fun to throw in when you can. We don't always get to this kind of thing with everything else, but we really enjoy it when we do.
5 days, 65 bloggers, 325 blog posts! Check out what others on the TOS Crew are writing about for the 5 Days of Series here.
What do you do to Bring Books to Life?
9 comments:
great ideas! We do this sometimes too and it is always lots of fun and great memory makers!
Good ideas! I've done this when the book has recipes...hadn't thought to do it just because of the book's theme.
Thanks for sharing.
I love all of these ideas! So creative!
Thanks ladies! We've also done some of the recipes found in books. I think there was one in Cranberry Thanksgiving that we did. Another one that comes to mind is from the book Finding Jesus in Genesis, we made the shortbread cookies that one of the characters always made : )
Dirt cake with gummy worms is always a hit. My kids enjoyed that recently after completing the Down By The Creekbank musical.
Jennifer,
That sounds fun! I think we are going to have to pull out some books on worms or the garden or something just to make some dirt cake to go along with it! : )
We made snowball cookies when we read Mike Mulligan for the first time. Such fun ideas!
Christina - sorry I missed this comment earlier. That sounds like fun, I will have to google snowball cookies to make in the winter. Thanks!
Great Blog!!!
We love reading The Polar Express in the winter time. We always follow up with the movie based off of the book. We enjoy using our imagination to turn our living room furniture into a train to sit on while watching the movie. We also bake all of the sweet treats found in the movie & make the hot chocolate too prior to viewing the movie. When the snack scene comes on in the movie I serve the treats & hot chocolate. Last year a good friend of mine & her children participated in our Polar Express party. We had so much fun! I can't wait to do it again next winter :-)
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