Lily's Purple Plastic Purse

At the end of the summer this year, my neighbors and I had a book exchange inspired by The Educator's Spin On It's Summer Book Exchange.  We paired up with another family and created a book package revolving around a book about school.  It went very well and I was so happy to get some great feedback from my friends!  The kids had fun, and we even celebrated with a playdate before school started again.

Earlier in the month I shared The Night Before Kindergarten book package that I sent to our friends.  I have been very impatient waiting to share the package that we received and had so much fun completing!

My friend sent us the book Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes, and I have to say that the way it was packaged, in it's very own purple plastic purse, was adorable!

In Lily's Purple Plastic Purse, Lilly loves school and her teacher, Mr. Slinger.  One day she goes to school with her new purse (full of fun and noisy things) and is so excited to show it to everyone that she keeps interrupting the class.  Since she won't stop distracting the class, her teacher takes the purse away and of course Lilly is very upset.  Mr. Slinger gives the purse back to Lilly at the end of the day and has a special note for her to read on the way home.  By the end of the story Lilly is happy again and loves her teacher even more than she did at the beginning of the story.

My sons were very excited to get working on the book and activities, but were a little distracted once they saw that the purple plastic purse that we had been given also included "movie star sunglasses" just like Lilly's.  They loved wearing them while we read!

Inside our book package was an adorable puppet activity for us to make different Lilly puppets out of paper plates.

The plan was to make a happy Lilly, sad Lilly, and angry Lilly and then use our masks as we read.  The boys argued over who was going to make each Lilly so we ended up with two happy Lilly's.  Fortunately, by the time they were done making their puppets, they started to get along again when we started to read the story again.

Baby Girl loved the angry Lilly puppet!

We also received some printable Lilly papers that included connect the dots and coloring.  They can be found on Kevin Henkes website!  The connect the dots page was a great challenge for my six year old since the numbers went very high and they weren't always right next to each other!

My wonderful friend knows that we love to cook so she even included some Lilly recipes in our package.  Of course, they both included cheese :-)

Last, but not least the package included an envelope for each of the boys to open up when they were done with the activities.  Inside the envelope was 3 quarters!  The boys had three quarters of their own just like Lilly did in the story!  Can you tell that they were thrilled?

If you like Kevin Henkes books be sure to check out the Virtual Book Club for Kids August link-up for lots of Kevin Henkes books and wonderful ideas to go with them!

Here are some other great blogs that have some great Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse activities!

Mommy and Me Book Club made adorable paper plate purses and played a matching coin game!

Creekside Learning also made a purple plastic purse out of a plastic bag and purple foam!

Also check out our latest giveaway of the book A Good Day provided by Harper Collins!

If you would like to follow along with us on our 366 day long journey to reading a new book everyday be sure to like our Facebook page!