You can take the teacher out of school (for the summer), but you can’t take the school out of a teacher. Every so often, I feel the need to tap into my “teacherness” and wave it upon my children. Enter family book day. The idea is that we share a book as a family and spend the day doing literary-inspired activities, crafts, and cooking. It’s really just a fun excuse to have a “theme day” in your house! The kids loved it!
Yesterday, we read How I Became a Pirate. It’s a wonderful read filled with imagination, quirky rules, and amusing pirate language. For the day, we ditched our landlubber identities and became … Toothless Jack (Harper) and Glass Eyed Sally (Jameson).
I drew up a quick treasure map of our backyard to start our day. The kids searched for clues where the X’s were.
When they put the clues together, it lead them to a tree under which they found treasure (two new paint sets and nautical wood cut-outs)!
After painting, the kids created their own maps. Harper chose to draw the backyard, and Jameson drew our family room. They marked their maps with three X’s and each buried a Hershey’s bar in one of the spots. Then, they switched maps and went hunting for the real treasure. Yum!
A couple of squares of chocolate energized them for their sink or float experiment. Harper played teacher as she instructed Jameson to predict which objects would float and which might sink. Harper happily hunted through the kitchen and the house for things that might be fun to toss into the water. It turns out baby pools are good for many things!
After this, Jameson crafted his own sailboat in the hopes it wouldn’t sink. After his “experiment,” he was hopeful for some wood to construct with (no extra wood here) so he had to make do with a paper boat. It was wildly successful – for ten minutes.
We wrapped up our pirate day with a treasure map pizza and pudding beach desserts. We used red pepper strips for the X on the pizza, pepperoni for the path, and basil for palm trees.
For dessert, we sprinkled the pudding with graham cracker crumbs and used mini chocolate chips for paths. Licorice would have made a perfect X, but we did not have any of that in our house. So, mini M&Ms it was.
At the end of the day, we chatted a lot about how books can inspire such joy in life and how just one story can create a day of celebration. It also reminds me of how important it is to keep that kind of magic around in my classroom. Even big kids love these kinds of things. I am off to make a book stack to pick the next great read for family book day … and perhaps start dreaming up some classroom editions, too.
Happy reading, friends! May you go to bed with a wonderful story in your lap tonight.
