Virtual Book Club for Kids--The Little Squeegy Bug

The author for September in the Virtual Book Club for Kids is Bill Martin, Jr. For those that do not know about the Virtual Book Club for Kids, each month a group of bloggers pick one author to feature on all of our blogs and host a blog hop. Each blogger picks one (or sometimes two) book by that author and does an activity or craft with it and posts about it. Then we open up the blog hop to anyone else who would like to share a book by the author of the month and an activity to go with it. The Virutal Book Club for Kids is brought to you by the following group of bloggers:

Toddler Approved- The Educators' Spin On It- Rainy Day Mum- 3 Dinosaurs- Learn~Play~Imagine - Crafty Moms Share - Reading Confetti- Inspiration Laboratories - Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas - Kids Yoga Stories - Enchanted Homeschooling Mom- Ready-Set-Read - Boy Mama Teacher Mama - PlayDrMom - Fantastic Fun and Learning - Growing Book by Book- Royal Baloo - The Outlaw Mom® Blog - Kitchen Counter Chronicles - Teach Preschool - Mama Smiles - Coffee Cups and Crayons - Juggling With Kids - Here Come the Girls-

This week we are presenting The Little Squeegy Bug by Bill Martin, Jr. This is a wonderful story about a little bug who does not know where he came from or what type of bug he is and how he became the first lightning bug/firefly. Everyone calls him a little squeegy bug because no one knows what type he is. One day while by the water he meets a bee. The bee scares the other little bugs, but not the squeegy bug. The squeegy bug asks him who he is. Then the squeegy bug wants a stinger in his tail and silver wings. The bee tells him he has to get to the sky to get silver wings. 

The little squeegy bug finds the highest cattail he can and climbs to the top. It takes three days and nights for him to get to the top. When he gets there a storm comes and he gets scared. A kind caterpillar comes and takes him in for the night and then takes him to his spider friend to see if he can help the squeegy bug. The spider wove the squeegy bug a pair of silver wings and told him he did not want a stinger in his tail since it hurt people. Instead the spider took a star and gave him light in his tail and gave him a name.

For this wonderful story we made fingerprint pictures. Hazel had been asking me to make fingerprint pictures again for awhile. She made a blue and red squeegy bugs first. Then she started copying what I was doing.

 

Hazel's Picture

My Picture

My memory of fireflies as a child is collecting them in jars at night and using them as night lights. Then in the morning we always let the very ugly (and scary to me) bugs go. Since Hazel goes to bed before the fireflies come out in the summer and now it is too cold at night for them here, I decided to do a craft to imitate this. I got the idea from the Halloween craft I saw at ShinDigz. 

We wrapped some LED mini lights in the fake spider web and stuck them in a recycled jar. Then to give more of a bug effect, I painted brown and glow-in-the-dark yellow "bugs" on the outside of the jar. Here is a picture with the lights on so you can see the jar more clearly.

So that is what we did for The Little Squeegy Bug. Have you read a Bill Martin, Jr. book recently and done a craft or activity? Feel free to share it here. We will also be doing another one some time next week. I hope you will come back and join us!