Readathon Week 3 at MeMeTales

I'm guest posting over at Happy Whimsical Hearts!! It is the day of her Happy Lil Hearts are Baking Link Party. Won't you come over and share with us?

As you know, we are participating in MeMeTales Readathon 2012. This is week 3 and in the first two weeks they have had 3,000 kids join in. For each child that joins they are donating a meal to FoodforEducation.org, so this is huge!! Plus the kids read 14,688 books this week. Their goal is to have 100,000 books read and donate 10,000 meals. If you haven't joined yet, please do. It is free and you get free books each week to go along with the theme that you can read on your computer or electronic book device.
So for week 3 of the Readathon, the theme is good character development. Let's face it, what child does not need this as a theme?  There are three free books this week.

The first is Ditto the Butterfly, a young butterfly who only likes to eat from buttercups. Her mother is afraid her wings will never grow colorful since she will not eat from various colors of flowers. One day Ditto sees a hummingbird with the most amazing wings and asks the hummingbird how it got such colorful beautiful wings. The answer of course is by eating from different color flowers, so after that Ditto eats from different color flowers and her wings grew beautiful. (We did a craft for this story see below.)

StickFiggy and The Piggy-Monkey of course features StickFiggy who we read a book about last week.  StickFiggy has his favorite raspberry pie and is all set to enjoy it when Piggy-Monkey comes over and acts nice. StickFiggy knows Piggy-Monkey will not be nice unless he wants something and sure enough he asks for a piece of pie. StickFiggy figures one piece won't hurt and shares, but Piggy-Monkey throws a tantrum when he cannot have the entire pie. StickFiggy runs off with the rest of the pie while Piggy-Monkey is throwing the tantrum and is long gone before Piggy Monkey realizes StickFiggy and the pie are gone. This was a great story. We had a wonderful discussion about the behaviors in it. 

Good Habits to Have is about just that--good habits. It discusses kindness, honesty, keep trying and confidence. It goes into how to have each one as well as why it matters or helps to have it.

In their e-mail newsletter they have some great curriculum ideas to go along with this. We made the Good Deed Rainbow. These are definitely some behaviors I want to start changing in Hazel and I think this might be a great incentive for it. We had a discussion about each one and she was able to tell her father what each one said. I hung it in her room. We will see if it works.

However today we did a butterfly craft. We used some foam butterflies that I bought a kit of awhile ago and we never did. First we started with the basic butterflies and talked about how that was like Ditto when she would only eat one type of food.

Next we decorated them to make them nice and colorful for after Ditto started trying other foods. We used the foam pieces that came with the kit and then pulled out the glitter glue to maker our butterflies extra beautiful. I think they came out lovely.

Our big discussion is what to do with them. Hazel wants to hang them in the window. I thought we should put them on her seasonal tree.