January Book & Cookie Club: The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher

Book & Cookie Club is a one hour long book discussion for students in 3rd through 5th grade and their adult caregivers.  I have been facilitating this program since December of 2015.  It is one of my favorite programs because I get to come up with new activities, icebreakers, and discussion games every month!

THE BOOK

This month, we read and discussed the book The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy.  It's a fabulous story about four brothers and their adventures and mishaps throughout the school year.

THE PLAN

I start every meeting with an icebreaker.  Participants were challenged to make words out of the phrase "Family Fletcher."  This was a very popular activity.  Some of my favorite words were : fairy, fart, and retch.  

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After the icebreaker, we played our discussion game.  Participants came up to the line, I asked a question about the book, and if they answered correctly they got to take a penalty shot.  ​There were some fascinating techniques that were used to get the wiffle ball into the goal. A PDF copy of the questions is down below.  I get a little silly when I write the multiple choice questions because the point of this program is to have some fun with friends and develop a love of reading.

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Hockey stick is made out of a yardstick and cardstock.

One of the Fletcher brothers has a knack for telling scary stories.  We tried our hands at our own scary story creation.  I found a really fun Spooky Ghost Story Madlib from Diva Girl Parties and Stuff.  The end result of the madlib had everyone roaring with laughter.

I always like to put together some activity stations for each book that we discuss.  This month, I had three stations: draw a pug, building bridges challenge, and finger soccer.

For the draw a pug station, I found a really neat video from Draw So Cute on YouTube that teaches you how to draw a pug.  I also found some tutorials on Pinterest which I printed and displayed.  I wanted to have an option for  participants that were feeling too impatient to follow along with the YouTube video.  I had a few darling Pug-icorns, and I am sad to say I forgot to take pictures of them!

For the bridge building challenge, I put out various items that participants could use to construct a bridge: straws, popsicle sticks, dominoes, jenga blocks, and masking tape.  The bridge had to be stable enough to hold some rubber bugs.  The challenge was to fit as many rubber bugs onto the bridge without causing the bridge to collapse.

The finger puppet soccer  station was a lot of fun to put together.  I used large green construction paper and created a small scale soccer field.  I printed off a couple of soccer player finger puppets from Kara's Party Ideas.  I am glad that I used cardstock for the finger puppets because regular printer paper would have ripped easily.  For the ball, I used a pom-pom.  Adults and kids had a lot of fun playing finger puppet soccer.  

Next month, we will be discussing El Deafo by Cece Bell.

The build a bridge challenge station.

The finger puppet soccer station.