Lovebooks Exchange: Charlie and Lola - I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato

As mentioned here, we participated in Love Books exchange organized by The Educator's Spin on It. We enjoyed it to the core.

For the exchange, we sent a package to A spoonfull of ideas and received one from Rashmi. Rashmi sent us a wonderful book from Charlie and Lola series - 'I will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato'. It is about a fussy eating little sister Lola and her brother Charlie who tricks her into eating everything that she doesn't like. I loved Charlie's imagination in calling carrots orange twiglets from Jupiter or green peas as raindrops from Greenland. The illustrations are simple but so attractive. A wonderful book for fussy eaters. Take a look ...

Thankfully Kuhu is not a fussy-eater or not at least when her mumma is around :) She loved the book as the story gave her ample thoughts to deal with her friends who refuse to eat veggies! I'm hearing all the wild things she is telling her friends at the daycare and pushing them to eat veggies !!

Rashmi put together two lovely activities for the book. See how wonderful they are -

One is the vegetable calender where Kuhu should paste a picture of veggies she ate that day. She jumped up to paste it even before reading the book. She ran to show me her empty lunch box. :) Every night she reminds me to help her paste the day's veggie on the calendar. For me, the calendar is a reminder of what has been eaten already in the week. We are loving this ongoing activity Rashmi. Kuhu is showing off the activity that Rashmi maushi and Swara sent her.

This is our routine these days... read the book, recollect what veggies we eat through the day, paste it and get a 'Smiley Sticker' if she ate it without adding Jam or ghee or butter. I'm loving this.

The 2nd activity is just awesome. Kuhu is excited to plant some seeds in her very own tiny pot. We are now waiting to see what would grow. Every morning she looks at the pot to see what's growing and reciting a Marathi poem 'Zhaad" on how a tree grows which goes like this -

Zhaad
written by La. Ma. Kadu

Ek pakshi udat aala,
chochitla bi takun gela.
Jaminina bi zhelun ghetla,
eka kappyat theun dila.

Kala Dhhaag dhhaun aala,
khup pani deun gela.
Suryana mag oon dila,
oobena bi khoosh zhala.
.......
.......

Attempting to translate the first stanza for my non-Marathi friends (with my non-existent poetry skills...)

Tree
One little birdie flying high,
Dropped a seed as it went by.
Mother Earth caught it around,
Kept it safe deep in the ground.
.......
.......

Thanks a lot Kim for organizing this in India.... we would love to do it again. Thanks a lot Rashmi... we have a gala time every night... I'll be making another calendar for fruits shortly.

We are ready...

.... to send our package to A Spoonfull of Ideas as a part of India Love Book Exchange.

Per the exchange schedule, we are supposed to send out the package to our partner by July 10th. I was worried if we will be able to make it in time. I was expecting it to be hard and so it was. Asking me why?? One... it is hard to select a book which you & your kid will like enough to assume that the partner kid would like it too. Two... you've to think / find at least one activity based on the story. Three.... you need gather all the material you need for the activity. And four.... you need to do the activity your kiddo...why do it? ... to write the instructions ya.... :-) Even if it was hard, it was enjoyable. We loved this process of preparing the package. I'm sure we'll have as much fun when we receive our package. Looking forward to that. So... what all did we do....

For once, I started early.... I looked for a book online (and ordered many except the one I'm sending !) but for books we liked, I couldn't think of an activity and for books where I could, we didn't like enough to send over ! Finally, in one of our trips to Crossword, I found this book... we read it a couple of times right there and liked it so much that I had to cajole Kuhu a lot to share it. :-) Once we had the book, I began thinking on the activities we could do. Everyday, I could think of a few to do but some days I didn't have material at hand to try how it turns out and on other days, the activity was not interesting enough for Kuhu to do it. After a few trials, I got the activities right and then began the hardest part... writing the instructions. Out of habit (of writing technical how-to's), I did a couple of drafts (not sure if these many drafts were really needed !!). When I was ready, I realized that instructions were just complicated for simple enough activities. So I started all over again and made it simple (or so I think!). And now we are ready with the package.

Why did we pick the book?
Kuhu and I loved it. As I read it to her, the book gave me a chance to talk about so many things to Kuhu. We talked about what is big... what is small, helping each other, sharing and how plants grow. So many things packed in one story !

What's the activity?
I drafted two main activities - one has cutting, lacing, scrambling all packed together and the other has coloring, cutting and glueing. One of them also opens up talking and learning about plants.

This is the package that just went out -

Are you asking me to show you the book and activities?? That's for A Spoonfull of Ideas to read, do the activities and let us know....... Got to wait till then....