Last year I was very involved in a bi-monthly Knights of Freedom Club for Clark and a bi-monthly Liberty Girls Club for Bethany and Elinor. Both were very positive experiences for all, but this year I decided to simplify things a bit. We are doing a once a month book club for both 8-11 boys and girls.We had our first meeting today and I dare say it was a smashing success! We read The Hobbit.
I took the structure of our meeting from my good friend Emily (www.messagesfromthemothership.blogspot.com). We are doing our discussion first, then having a snack and game having to do with the book. In this picture the kids are enjoying bacon and eggs because Bilbo was always dreaming of bacon and eggs in his hobbit hole.
We had quite a bit of rain today so we had to change one of our planned games to play it inside instead of outside. We played an inside version of "Capture the Arkenstone". We wrapped an apple in tin foil and "the hobbit" hid it somewhere in the house. The boys were the dwarves and the girls were the elves and it was a competition to see which team could find it first. Whoever found it got to be the next hobbit.
When Bethany hid it she was having such a hard time keeping it secret. It was driving her nuts. She is SO my daughter!
When the rain stopped we did go outside for "Smaug Tag". Smaug is the dragon guarding the treasure in The Hobbit. Smaug tag was a basically Candle Tag (which is similar to freeze tag). There are about 3,000 different versions of tag-- and all kids seem to know ALL of them.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE watching kids this age play running games outside. I love to watch how they work things out-- what game to play, who is it, what are the rules, what is fair, who is on who's team, how they work our disputes. It is really quite complicated business and I think we adults could learn a lot from them on how to get along with others.
We have a really fantastic group of kids in our neighborhood and they can run and play forever and it seems like everyone has a fun time.
The greatest game we came up with was the outside "Capture the Arkenstone" we were able to play after the rain stopped.
This is how it worked. The Arkenstone was in the middle of the trampoline. 3 or 4 dwarves were guarding it. Here are the first round of dwarves (note the beards).
Then the Elves (note the ears) had to try to get on the trampoline and get a hand on the arkenstone without getting tagged by a dwarf. If they got tagged they had to go to jail until a teammate rescued them.
I just ADORE these kids! Such personalities.
2 comments:
Yeah!! I'm glad it went well. We had our book club today, too, and was our best yet. We read Fablehaven (Clark needs to read it if he hasn't yet) and talked about the book for 35 minutes. That's a long time for these young kids. They would have kept discussing, but I had games planned and we were running out of time!
What are you reading next?
Clark has read them and he loved them. We are reading "Number the Stars" by Lois Lowry.
Thanks for the great idea.
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