Hooray! We have a new reading milestone! We just finished book # 40 of Magic Tree House: Eve of the Emperor Penguin. Since this happened to coincide with her kindergarten classroom doing a unit on penguins, I felt an emperor penguin lunch was entirely necessary!

The penguin is made out of a tortilla that I cut by hand and then colored with food markers. I tried to capture the essence of the penguin on the cover of the Magic Tree House book as best as I could.  I gave him some cheddar cheese fish to eat.  I cut those out with a tiny cookie cutter that I picked up at Daiso the last time I was in San Francisco. Girlie said she was going to make the penguin eat the fish and then roll them up and eat them all together.  She had a lot to say about the accuracy of my penguin and was particularly upset about his orange eye, because penguin eyes are black.  She was pretty happy overall and excited to show her friends.  I also gave her yogurt with fresh blueberries and carrots with sugar snap peas.

Have your kids read these books?  Girlie and I are completely hooked and I can’t believe we are nearing the end of the collection!  It is hard to imagine we’ve read forty chapter books since we first started the series last summer.  We’re still reading a couple of chapters a night, but one thing has changed. Now, Girlie reads along with me and sometimes reads entire paragraphs of the book aloud to me! She’s also instituted a new Sunday morning tradition of waking me up to read to her before the boys are up.  This started a few weeks ago when she noticed it had snowed overnight and she had the great idea of snuggling up with me on the couch and reading together.  She knew that I’d have some objections to be woken up before light of day on a Sunday morning, but she planned ahead!  She fired up the Keurig and had coffee ready for me and had my slippers ready and the book in her hand.  How could I say no to that?? Now it happens every weekend!

I love reading with this kid and making lunches together.  We have so much fun coming up with ideas for lunches and activities. It is a great way to work collaboratively on her learning.

You can read more about our other Magic Tree House lunches by clicking on the links below:

If you have a good suggestion on what we should read next, please leave it in the comments!  I am excited for Harry Potter first and foremost, but I know there must be many other series that we should be looking into.  Please let me know what you or your kids love to read at the kindergarten & first grade ages.

These are the products I used in this lunch:

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