Reading Tent Town 2

This post won't make any sense unless you first go here to read about the first time we did Tent Town.  Ok, go. 

 Did you read it?  Alright, moving on...

This time we had the same amount of kids, but less moms and one more tent.  That was a little hard because there weren't any extra moms around to wrangle the littlest kids.  So my son (3 years old) and the other 2 year old boys mostly wandered instead of sitting down to listen to stories.  Oh well.  I'm just happy that Tertius at least listened to the food story and the story that I read. 

Speaking of the "food story," this time instead of Stone Soup, Cindy read The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) by Philemon Sturges.  After the story, the kids moved to my patio where they made their own English muffin pizza.  (Last time the food tent was just way too crowded with all the tables we needed to accommodate all the kids.  So instead of using a bigger tent, we just removed the tables.)  The toppings we had available were pepperoni, Italian sausage, olives, and mozzarella and cheddar cheese. 

Tip: Pre-label a square of tin foil with permanent marker so the kids can make their pizzas on there and then easily move them to a cookie sheet. 

While the kids visited the other story tents, the pizza was popped in the oven for a few minutes and the mess was cleared away.

The stories that were read this time were: King Bidgood, The Hiccupotamus, Caps for Sale, A Girl and Her Gator, The Gruffalo, a book about trains, and a book about fire trucks. 

When everyone was done listening to stories, they came back to the patio to find their cooked pizzas on a plate with the ingredients for a fruit dessert pizza. 

Tip: To make things easy, buy sugar cookies from the bakery.  To make things less messy, scoop a glob of Cool Whip Frosting (so yummy!) for each child with a large craft stick before they sit down to decorate.



Everyone was sent home with these cute books I made out of Hershey's Nuggets.

A big thanks to Cindy for helping me and making these fun events possible!  Her and I (Ok, mostly her) were coming up with other fun ideas for Reading Tent Town so here they are:

*Do it monthly and maybe rotate between homes.  If we were to do this, I don't think we would do a food story each time.
*Do it in the evening.  Roast hotdogs and marshmallows over a fire pit.  Have the kids come in their pajamas.  With older kids, it could even be a backyard sleep-over afterwards.
*Instead of making lunch, do a craft.  You could even have an easy craft (and/or coloring page) available based on each story read.  The kids have to choose at the end which was their favorite story and then do the corresponding craft. 

I'm sure we'll be doing another one of these soon!