If You Give a Pig a Pancake

The third (and final, though there are more books) week of of our "If You Give a . . . " series! This one was not my favorite, as the story seemed a little more outlandish than the others, but they're all cute enough. Also, if you care about such things, this is the first one (that we've read) that featured a girl as the main character. Also, I should confess publicly that I did NOT take the opportunity to discuss cause and effect, as I said I would in last week's post. The best of intentions . . . 

Food: piggie pancakes, of course! Many thanks to my husband for making pancakes (not just this week, but every Tuesday morning!). Owen, of course, remembered that last time we made piggie pancakes, the eyes were banana, so after this picture was taken, I added some banana-coin eyes. He does love routines, that one.

Crafts: I found this pancake craft here. I cut four simple circles out of brown construction paper and had the boys glue them to paper plates. Since we always have chocolate chips in our pancakes, they wanted to use markers to add "chips." Owen decided his would be pink, and that would make them "piggie chocolate chips." He's so creative. :)

Thanks to our weekly breakfasts at Cracker Barrel, I have a collection of their little syrup bottles. For this craft, I emptied out the syrup (okay, I used it to make this warm chocolate soother as a special treat for me) and re-filled it with a little glue and a little brown tempera paint. It didn't mix nearly as well as I hoped (shaking the bottle), so I added a few drops of water, which helped a bit.

This turned out to be an excellent teaching opportunity on the art of pouring syrup, as both boys immediately dumped the bottle straight upside-down. Hooray for real-life skills!

Our pig craft was a sort of compilation of various ideas I'd seen around the web. I thought the toilet paper tube idea was cute, but the specific version I saw first used materials I don't have (like pink polka-dotted washi tape). I find myself using Google's "image search" more and more for our activities. It's so easy to scan the pictures, and the open whichever pages look promising. Such a search provided me with our pig-parts template. I drew on the ears and nose and cut out the pieces; the boys did all the gluing. Again with the construction paper and googly eyes . . . what can I say, it's easy!

Science/art: As you can see in the above picture, this week I had some basic informational books about pigs on hand in addition to the Kingfisher Encyclopedia. I had intended to have books like this for every week, but my one trip to the library three weeks ago was rather disappointing (as in, nothing non-fiction on mice or moose). The Ed Emberley drawing was especially cute this week, and I was pleased/amused to find Levi drawing pigs spontaneously when he and Owen got free reign with the markers one afternoon.

One pig hiding in the grass . . . 

 . . . and the other flying upside-down 79.5 feet in the air. Or so I'm told.