Children's Books and DVDS With a Space Theme

The next week for our MOMS Camp is "Blast Off!" It's a week about space, rockets, planets, and the moon and stars. I'm hoping to make a trip to our city's Planetarium this week, along with an amusement park so we can go on a rocket ride! Each day we will read books and watch DVD's having to do with space.

Here's a list of some space-themed children's books to read:

The Planets by Martha E. H. Rustad
Rockets and Spaceships by Karen Wallace (beginning reader)
National Geographic Kids: Planets by Elizabeth Carney (beginning reader)
Space Shuttles by Colleen Sexton
Glow In The Dark Constellations by C.E. Thompson (This one has more print than I would normally read to my own kids, ages 4 and 7, but the glow in the dark pictures are great!)
Stars and Constellations by Nick Hunter (this one about constellations is a little more readable)
Zoom, Rocket, Zoom! by Margaret Mayo
A Trip Into Space by Lori Haskins Houran (love this rhyming book!)
Stars by Mary Lyn Ray (not what you'd expect!)
Green Wilma Frog In Space by Tedd Arnold
The Moon by Robert Louis Stevenson, pictures by Tracey Campbell Pearson
and of course, Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown!

Here's a list of some space-themed DVD's to watch, listed with movies first:

Wall-E
Muppets in Space
Escape From Planet Earth
Fly Me To The Moon (this one was really cute and showed some very realistic stuff from NASA!)
Megamind
Space Buddies
Star Wars Saga
VeggieTales: Veggies in Space
Backyardigans: Mission to Mars
Tom and Jerry In Space
Cat in the Hat: Space is the Place!
Curious George: Rocket Ride and Other Adventures!

Finally, a fun CD to listen to with your kids is Rocketship Run by the Laurie Berkner Band

Childrens Books and Movies for a Weather Theme

Summer Vacation is here and MOMS Camp 2014 has begun! MOMS Camp is something I came up with several years ago to make the most of my time with my kids during the summer. It stands for Make Our Moments Special. I've given each week over the summer a different theme.  Throughout each week we'll explore that theme with activities, crafts, movies, books, and outings. 

First off we have "Weather Week!"... complete with sunshine, clouds, rain, wind, storms, tornadoes, and ending with rainbows! We are focusing on the weather that we will be experiencing this time of year here in Kansas. This is the one time ALL SUMMER I'll be happy to see thunderstorms in the forecast! haha!

A list of books we will read this week are:

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Freddy The Frogcaster by Janice Dean
Clouds by Marion Dane Bauer
Little Cloud by Eric Carle
The Police Cloud by Christoph Niemann
In Like a Lion Out Like a Lamb by Marion Dane Bauer
Molly and the Storm by Christine Leeson
Stormy Weather by Debi Gliori
Extreme Weather: Tornadoes by Anne Wendorff
Over the Rainbow by Eric Puybaret
A Fairy Ballet by Daisy Meadows
Rainbow Magic: The Weather Fairies Set by  Daisy Meadows
Elmer and the Rainbow by David McKee


DVD's I've checked out from the library for this week include:

Sid the Science Kid: Weather Kid Sid
Sid the Science Kid: What is a Rainbow?
Elmos's World: The Great Outdoors (includes an episode called Weather)
Sesame Street: Elmo's Rainbow and Other Spring Stories
Dora the Explorer: Shy Rainbow
Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (1 and 2!)
The Wizard of Oz

Cave Drawings

One of our favorite parts of Cave Week was learning about cave drawings!! We read a cute book about "Grunt! The Primitive Cave Boy" by Timothy Bush.  In it a boy draws animals on his cave walls and they come to life. Then we decided to create our own cave drawings!

I used two huge sheets of brown packing paper to tape on our own "cave" walls (a corner in the living room we covered with blankets). I had been saving that packing paper for months! It originally came in a package I'd ordered from Amazon and I knew it would come in handy!

We decorated our cave walls using crayons.  Each of us got to do a different section. To find some real examples of cave drawings we could replicate, we took to the internet to find pictures of real examples of cave paintings. Here are the links to the ones we really liked:


One

Two

Three

 

This was such a fun project because it involved learning, a creative project, and imaginative play! Molly (6) loved finding real examples of cave drawings and discussing what each image stood for or what story it would tell.  As for the actual drawing part? My kids ventured in their cave to keep adding to it all week! Finally, both of them had a blast pretending to be cave men.... or even explorers discovering the drawings we'd done and speculating about the cave men who lived there. Weeks later our cave drawings are still up!

Robot Books and Movies

Each week of MOMS Camp I pick out books and movies to go along with our current theme. This week we did robots because my three year old is really into them. He loves to walk around the house pretending to be a robot and even reprimands me for talking like "a mommy" and not a robot!

Here's a list of our favorite robot books from the library this week:

The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot
by Margaret McNamara and Mark Fearing
(A fun, outer-space version of the Three Little Pigs.)

Robot Zot
by Ian Scieszka and David Shannon
(Wonderful illustrations and a funny *little* robot who is very silly and brave.)

The Robobots
by Matt Novak
(A very zany tale of a new robot family that teaches a valuable lesson.)

See Otto
by David Milgrim
(This is part of a Ready-to-Read series that's perfect for my little blooming reader! It has easy pages, including "Go, Otto, go!" and my daughter (age 6) was so proud to read it to me and her little brother! This one actually has my favorite illustrations, by the way, because they are hilarious.)

Our favorite robot movies from this week are:

Wall-E (of course)

The Iron Giant (my 3 year old son LOVED this one because it includes tanks and weapons, but it might be a little much for your child if they get scared easily at giant angry robots and the military)

The Backyardigans: Robot Repairman

Books and KC Outings for a Neighborhood Theme

We had a whole week about Your Neighborhood for MOMS Camp and it was a blast! I chose that theme to fit a few projects I had in mind, but was so happy to find many fun ideas (besides a walk in our own neighborhood and regular errands like the bank and post office) all week long! As always we began our week with a trip to the library to pick up some books and DVDs I'd ordered ahead of time. We really loved the Elmo's World: People in my Neighborhood DVD  because it talked about police officers and firefighters, etc. Even Molly (5) watched it, even though she tried to tell me she was too old for Elmo! Here's a few of our favorite books from this week:

Welcome to My Neighborhood by Judith Casely
This is My Town by Mercer Mayer
On My Street by Eve Merriam

Our favorite outing this week was to the Kidscape exhibit at the Johnson County History Museum! It was free to visit and a great break from being outdoors in the summer heat. The exhibit has several little wooden stores (big enough for adults to walk through), creating a miniature town inside the museum. There's a doctor's office, library, store, theater, pretend fish pond, and my personal favorite room: CARS AND TRAINS! Everything was made so nice and it was kept up so well. My kids were not ready to leave when it was time to leave so I'm sure we'll be going back some day!

(I admit the wooden patient in the doctor's office was a little disturbing... but the kids didn't seem to notice anything accept the fun potential and educational value!)

If you haven't been to Antioch Park you definitely need to take your kids! They have three playground sets, one of which is brand new! They have great walking paths and two ponds... but for this week the important part was their play town! There are several wooden buildings (also large enough for adults to walk through) laid out like an old western town with signs painted on them like "Jail", "Town Hall", and "Hotel". Here's my poor, wrongly-accused children in the jail:

Butterfly Books to Read With Your Kids

Molly (5) really enjoyed learning about butterflies during our butterfly week of MOMS Camp. We found some great books at our local library that did a good job teaching the life cycle of a butterfly to her age group. Some of our favorites are:

"Are You A Butterfly?" by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries. It has beautiful illustrations and tells all about butterflies in a very cute way! For example, "...You grow bigger. And bigger...You feel so full you think you are going to burst."

"Starting Life Butterfly" by Claire Llewellyn was our favorite. It has so much detail about a butterfly's life. You can choose to read all the script in all the little side notes, or just stick to the main parts. I actually learned a lot about butterflies that I didn't know! The different sizes of pages are fun, too.

A fun book to read is "Angelina and the Butterfly" by Katharine Holabird. It's a cute story of how Angelina and Alice find a butterfly that later saves the day! I also found this one on DVD from the library which was fun to watch. 

Finally, "The Butterfly Alphabet" by Kjell B. Sandved is so interesting! It has cute verses for each letter... and close up photographs of different butterfly wings with letters in their designs! There is also photos of the butterfly from far away. It was so neat to see all the different butterflies!

After reading these books, I had Molly review the butterfly life cycle with a really cool Sequencing Life Cycle Sticker Kit I found at Oriental Trading. It was on sale and included other life cycles that we'll use later in the summer so it was a real win-win find! Each sticker had more facts on it and was a fun project for Molly. Later, as we visited playgrounds, she liked looking for butterfly eggs and baby caterpillars on the leaves!

Summer Themed Reading List

A special part of MOMS Camp is finding books and movies about our theme at the public library! Part of that is the visit to the library and the walk there. Part of it is having new books to read at bed time! Here's a few titles for this week's theme of Summer Sunshine!

 "Kitten's Summer" by Eugenie Fernandes is cute and fun to read. It's fun to find the kitten on each page; not to mention the beautiful artwork! It's so interesting - pictures made of clay and other mediums.

"One Summer Day" by Kim Lewis also has beautiful illustrations. The way she draws the little boy is so lifelike and true to the way a toddler moves! Anyway, this is a fun story to read my with son, Ben (2), because it's all about a little boy his age and what he does on one summer day.

"Pinkalicious and the Pink Drink" by Victoria Kann is a cute one to read with my daughter, Molly (5). It's especially meaningful since lemonade has become our official drink of the summer... considering Ben can say it perfectly and asks for it throughout the day!

Finally, "Bear Shadow" by Frank Asch is a great one to read when you start discussing how the sunshine makes shadows!


These are only a few of the books we've been reading and they're all great... "but you don't have to take my word for it!" (Please, someone tell me you know what that's from and that I'm not such a dork afterall! hahaha

Fun Birthday Books to Read With Your Child

I just thought I'd take a moment to share some of my favorite "birthday books" I read with my kids at bedtime. These titles don't mention a birthday, so you wouldn't necessarily find them in a search.

Here's one we've been reading forever and it's one of Molly's(5) favorites year 'round. *I can't believe I had to just type that Molly is five!! Her birthday was Friday and I still can't believe I have a five-year-old! Anyway... The Jolly Barnyard by Annie North Bedford is a Little Golden Book Classic. It goes through all the farm animals and what they eat and what they do for the farmer, all on Farmer Brown's birthday.

A Little Fairy Magic by Julia Hubery has a really cute story line about a sweet little mouse on her birthday who does some "real" magic for her little brother. Of course since Molly has a little brother, Ben(2), it's perfect for her! **I can't believe I had to just type that Ben is two!! His birthday was on Saturday and I still can't believe my baby is already two! Anyway...

My daughter is really into scary things like vampires, witches, Frankenstein and Darth Vader, so Wolf's Coming! by Joe Kulka is right up her alley. It's a surprising story about all the animals running away from Wolf before he sees them. We have fun finding the blue balloon on every page and it has a very fun and NOT scary ending!

Finally, one of my personal favorites is Every Cowgirl Needs a Horse by Rebecca Janni. It is so cute and cleverly written! She tells a story of a little cowgirl living in a regular neighborhood who just wants a horse for her birthday. At the beginning, she "shakes the sleep from her braids" and from that moment on I love reading every word!

Here are links to each of these books on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Jolly-Barnyard-Little-Golden-Book/dp/0375828427/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331525211&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Fairy-Magic-Julia-Hubery/dp/1561487139/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331525247&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Wolfs-Coming-Carolrhoda-Picture-Books/dp/1575059304/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331525254&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Cowgirl-Needs-Horse-Rebecca/dp/0525421645/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331524605&sr=8-1