Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Book Club: My Side of the Mountain

I had heard that only 12 year old boys enjoy reading My Side of the Mountain, but I must say that our whole book club (none of us have a 12 year old boy) really enjoyed this read. Here's how our meeting went:

1. Go around the circle and share your favorite part.

2 We discussed certain points of interest in the book such as Sam's ability to remain isolated for so long without a search party coming for him!

3. Divide into family teams (we have 3 families in our club) and play Plant Concentration. I made color copies of the plants that were mentioned or drawn in the book (just got images from Google) and glued them onto construction paper squares. On the back of the squares I labelled them A, B, C, etc. I then taped them to a large board. on another board I taped similarly prepared squares with the names of the plants I had selected. On the back of this second set of squares I labelled them 1, 2, 3, etc. The object was to match the name of the plant with the correct picture in a Classic Concentration sort of way. Each family had an answer key to help them.

4. Fashion show! This was a real hit! We discussed Sam's need to create his own clothing while away in the woods for so long and the methods he used for doing this. And while we didn't have any deer skins available, we did have plenty of brown paper sacks from the grocery store. Each family was given the same number of grocery bags, some yarn, tape, scissors, whole punch. Each family was removed to a separate part of the house to work on their own fashion creation using the supplies given. Each family chose a member of the family to model the creation and be a part of the fashion show. So cute!

5. We ended with some pancakes and blueberry jam. No, no acorn flour here. Just hand ground whole wheat flour. They were gobbled right up!

Super fun night!