Summer Love Books Exchange - Up and Down by Oliver Jeffers

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We love books so have been really excited to take part in The Educator's Spin On It Love Books Exchange.  Basically bloggers are paired up and you each send one another a kids book and related crafts.  We were matched with The Gingerbread House who we sent Aliens Love Underpants (a household favourite) and we received Up and Down by Oliver Jeffers plus no less than FIVE crafts.  Here's how we got on...

Up and Down (affiliate link) by Oliver Jeffers is a lovely story of a boy and a penguin who wants to fly, I won't spoil it for you, but the story involves planes, a cannon and a circus and the boys thoroughly enjoyed it.

And so to the crafts, Jenny from The Gingerbread House sent us five different crafts three penguin crafts, friendship bracelets and dream catchers.  I'm going to share three of them here as we are saving two of the penguin crafts for a rainy day.

1 - Penguin Footprints

First up penguin footprints, as you can imagine the boys were delighted to be allowed to paint the soles of their feet.

They printed their feet onto paper and then added some white paint for the penguin's belly's

Then they added feet, beaks and eyes with pens.  Fortunately the paint dried pretty quick so they were able to do each stage back to back as my kids seriously don't have the concept of needing to wait for paint to dry.  Patience is not a family virtue!

And, these are the results.... Champs are on the left (with assistance from me) and Bud's handiwork is on the right although he decided that he'd re-design his penguins to look like him and a friend dressed up hence the penguin mutation into humans!

2 - Dream Catchers

This was probably my favourite craft, dream catchers.  We started by cutting out the centre of the paper plates that Jenny had provided for us.

Then the boys decorated them with washi tape and foam stickers.  We also added a loop of string so we could hang them.

Here are the results.  I did the one on the left and Bud did the one on the right.  I used string to create the dream catcher part, but Bud was rather taken with the washi tape.

3 - Friendship Bracelets

And finally, friendship bracelets.  We chopped up the straws Jenny had sent then threaded them onto string.  Bud could only be enticed to do this activity if he could use all green straws and tell everyone it was a Ninja Turtle Power Weapon (or something like that!).

Whereas Champ was quite taken with this craft, although judging from this picture I think he may then also have declared his friendship bracelet a weapon too, hmmmm not quite what I had in mind!

I hope you've enjoyed this post.  If you'd like to check out more book related activities then check out the Love Books page and Pinterest Board.