Backyard Book Club: Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms Overview

Our August Backyard Book Club meeting may have been the best of all! Once again, here's an overview of everything we did. (Click the links below for detailed instructions and more information.)

For this month's meeting, the kids read Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms. It was a little longer than our previous picks, so we made sure everybody knew they could still come even if they hadn't finished. (Click here for the book spotlight with online resources and other ideas.)

Our book trivia challenge took the form of Beech Road Bingo (click for printable) where the kids each filled out their own bingo card with significant numbers and letters from the book.

Next, we took a page from April, May, and June's book and tried to make our own edition of the Beech Road Guardian. We divided the kids up into teams and gave them an assignment for our newspaper. We had news, weather, a fabulous feature article, and several movie reviewers. Click here for the PowerPoint template I used to put the newspaper together after the meeting was over. (I emailed the finished project to the parents so the kids could print their own copies of the paper.)

If we'd had more time (and hadn't been quite so noisy) we would have done the Bird Behavior Scavenger Hunt. But since we were running a little late, we went straight to the main event...

The magic show! The kids watched with great attention while I performed the tricks and couldn't wait to learn how to do them themselves. And hopefully their careers as magicians are just beginning thanks to their take-home magic kits. :)

We finished up the meeting by eating brownies and cupcakes (just like Stuart and the triplets). We had so much fun this summer and the wheels are already turning for next summer's meetings...