The Night Before Kindergarten

I recently participated in the Love Books Summer Book Exchange hosted by The Educator's Spin On It and had such a great time that I thought it might be fun to do something similar in our neighborhood.

The idea was to take a group of six families in our area and pair them up to exchange books and activities.  I sent out the email to my friends and I was unsure of the response I would get, but everyone was interested and excited!  I decided to set up a school themed book exchange so everyone would have a starting point!  I certainly didn't want people to be intimidated by this project!

Here are some of the guidelines we set up for our Back to School Book Exchange!

1.  Choose a school based book (new or used).

2.  Create a project or two to go along with the book.  Send enough supplies for all kids in the family to participate.  Of course, we left out supplies that we knew our friends would have.

3.  Deliver it to our book buddies before July 27.

4.  Complete the delivered book package with our own families before our celebration (aka playdate).

I had a lot of fun planning our book exchange for our friends!  Our book buddies included a 6 year old boy, 4 year old girl, and 2 year old boy.  The six year old is starting kindergarten in a few weeks, so the book we chose was The Night Before Kindergarten by Natasha Wing.

The Night Before Kindergarten is a story told in the same rhyming pattern as The Night Before Christmas, but follows children as they get ready for school and then go to their new classroom.  In the first pages there are visions of school supplies dancing in the children's heads.  The last few pages of the book touch on how it is sometimes harder for the parents to leave the kids than it is for the kids to leave the parents, and in my experience so far, I find this to be SO true!

Here are the activities I included in the book package along with the book.

Activity Number One

Pillow Cases

I sent three pillowcases with some paint.  This activity included decorating a pillowcase to use on the night before kindergarten.  I included a few ideas like making a hand print, stamping apples, and painting their names on the pillowcases.

Activity Number Two

Countdown to Kindergarten Chain

I included a calendar and scrapbook paper so that the kids could count how many days until kindergarten starts and then make their own countdown chain.

Activity Number Three

Brownie Chalkboards

I know that this family loves to bake so I wanted to include something that involved cooking.  I included a box of brownies with some white icing.  The idea was to make brownie chalkboards and use the icing as "chalk".  I included some ideas for decorating from Betty Crocker's website.  The chalkboards pictured on the website are white, but I thought the dark background was more authentic!

I sure hope our book buddies have as much fun with their book package as we did with theirs!  Here is a sneak peek into what the book package we had delivered to our house included.  Isn't it adorable?

For more book package ideas check out our Zoomer book package that we sent out for the Summer Love Books Book Exchange and for even more book related activities follow our Facebook page!