Harriet the Spy

Planning a movie night around Harriet the Spy was hard for me, because I haven't seen the movie since I was a kid.  Luckily, Wikipedia is my friend and one of my (human) friends reminded me that Harriet eats tomato sandwiches every day in the movie.

We started out by making spy journals.  I gave the kids each a stack of about 5 sheets of plain white paper.  They folded them in half, making a book, and we stapled it.  Then they decorated them however they wanted.  I wish I had taken a picture, because they were really cute!  Then we played I Spy, you know the game where someone says "I spy with my little eye, something that is__________" and everyone has to guess what it is.  We actually played I Spy while we ate dinner.

For dinner, we did tomato sandwiches.  Savannah was thrilled since tomatoes are her favorite food.  The rest of us were not so thrilled, so I cheated and did BLTs for Michael and I and just a bacon sandwich for Lincoln, who hates tomatoes and lettuce.  We had grapes on the side, because that was the only fruit or veggie I could come up with to put with a character's name.  For our drink we had Sport's Sprite, which was really just regular Sprite.  I wanted to do spiral cookies for desert, but I didn't like any of the recipes I found online, so I improvised.  I started out with a sugar cookie mix, and mixed it according to directions.  I took half out, and added a jello pack to the other half, making it green and lime flavored.  Then I rolled them both out, stacked them, rolled them together and sliced the cookies.  Some of them I rolled the edges in sprinkles, but I ended up not liking them that way and left the rest non-sprinkled.

The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog is a movie that I wanted to do for Friday Fun right from the start, but it took us a while to get to it.  Our first activity was Jazz Band.  We started by making shakers out of tin cans.  The kids decorated them with paper and markers, then we filled them with dry beans and rice and hot glued them shut. When they were done we looked up Jazz music on YouTube and the kids shook their cans and drummed on them with silverware.  Somehow, I didn't take any pictures of that.

Next we had frog races.  The kids hopped like frogs across the living room and the first to touch the opposite wall one.  I think they did it like 10 times in a row.

Food on this one pretty much planned itself.  How could we not do gumbo?  I had planned to make it from scratch, but I decided to get lazy and we had Zatarans with smoked sausage and shrimp.   We did green beans for our vegetable since there weren't any in the gumbo.  Fizzy Frog Soda was sparkling water with lime juice and green food coloring.  The beignets were my favorite part of the meal.  They are a fancy French pastry, but we made them quick and easy by cutting Pillsbury biscuits into fourths, frying them and dipping them still hot into powdered sugar or a cinnamon sugar mixture.  Everyone LOVED them.

Hotel Transylvania

We missed seeing Hotel Transylvania in theaters, so we did it for Friday Fun the week it was released on DVD, even though it wasn't October.  It is always hard to plan a movie night when I haven't seen the movie.  Luckily this movie is themed enough that it wasn't too hard.

Dinner was based entirely on the characters.  We did Mummy Dogs, Frankenstein's Fries (sweet potatoes roughly cut into fry shape and baked), Blood Juice (cranberry juice), and Big Foot Bait which was cake batter puppy chow. 

We started out by playing Monsterize Yourself on the movie's website. It looks like that game has been removed, but there is a Hotel Transylvania game. 

After that I sent the kids upstairs to change into their vampire costumes from Halloween.  When they came down I pretended to be a hotel check-in person (is there a name for that?) and after pretending to check them in on my computer, I handed them a key.  I showed them to their "room" which was just the bean bag in our tv room made up like a bed, and informed them that there would be a monster party in the hotel lobby in five minutes. 

  When they came back to the lobby/my dinning room I played Monster Mash on my laptop and they danced.   Finally they went back to their "room" to watch the movie. 

We Bought a Zoo

We Bought a Zoo is another that we did a long time ago.

Our first activity was, "act like an animal."  It was basically charades.  The kids took turns choosing any animal they wanted and pretending to be that animal.  The rest of us guessed.  It was pretty much impossible with the animals that they came up with.  Savannah was a cat, a lion and a cheetah.  Lincoln was an armadillo, and aardvark and a hawk.  Somehow I didn't take any pictures or video of this.  I think if I did this game again, I might print pictures of the animals and have them draw one to act out to make it a bit easier on the guessers.

Next we made a zoo.  This took a LOT more time than I expected because the kids got really into it.  They drew pictures of zoo animals and cut them out. They even made themselves zookeepers. Then we glued them to the bottom of a box that I had cut the lid off of, and taped on strips of cardboard (cut from the lid) to make a cage.  Not very accurate since all the animals were in one cage together, but the kids had a lot of fun making it!

For dinner we had "Zoo Stew" which was regular beef stew, "elephant ears" which were frybread, "Jungle Juice" (the little bottles of sugary punch you can buy at the gas station, similar to bug juice,) and "Gorilla Poops" otherwise known as no-bake cookies.  My kids both LOVED the meal, which was shocking since Lincoln had never before even tasted stew.

  

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, Mirror was one of the first Friday Fun movies that we did.  It was almost a year ago, and I didn't take many pictures.  For our activities, during the day we "explored the haunted forest." Obviously it wasn't really haunted, I just took them on a fairly wooded hike they had never done before. 

Next, we made crowns out of construction paper.  The kids just cut a piece of paper and decorated with with jewels, then taped it into a crown.

For our dinner, we had "dwarf dogs" which were mini corndogs, "poison applesauce" which was regular applesauce colored green," "magic potion" which was Sprite with some food coloring, and finally we walked down to the snowcone stand near our house to get snowcones before watching the movie.

What is Friday Fun?

Friday Fun is an idea I totally stole from my friend, Beth.  We've done movie night on Fridays for as long as I can remember.  When I was a single mom and feeling guilty that I didn't have much time to spend with my kids, I came across the idea on Beth's Facebook page.  She calls it Sunday Funday.  The idea is that you pick a movie to watch with your kids and plan a meal and activities around the movie.

The first few weeks we did Friday Fun were the hardest.  Now that I am used to doing it weekly it takes maybe 30 minutes out of my week to plan and prepare.  I have a template saved on my computer to make the "plan" which goes on the fridge on Friday afternoon.  I try to do one or two activities, ideally a craft and an active game, but it doesn't always go exactly that way.  Some weeks we'll just do one more elaborate activity, and some weeks we are short on time and cut out the activities all together.  Food is the big surprise in our house.  Its amazing what kids are willing to try when it has a fun name.  I try to do at least a main course, a side dish, a drink and a dessert for each movie.  Usually its just regular food that we would eat any time with new "fancy" names.  My kids love it!