Today, we went on a field trip!

Some homeschooling friends invited us to join their kid book club last year, and it has been a blast! We use Treehouse Schoolhouse’s book club kits, and this month, read My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I hadn’t read this one before, and it is darling. My kids all enjoyed it–even my preschooler! It is so short and engaging, you could probably read it one sitting.

It was my turn to plan book club today, so we met at our local zoo. This fit the theme of the book perfectly, as it involves many animals on an exotic island. We started with a “tropical” snack: FRUIT RIOT. If you haven’t tried this, you must. It’s frozen fruit, coated in a sour crusty coating–think Sour Patch Kids, but slightly more nutritious (ha!) I got the sour mango and sour grape versions.

For this book club, I created a scavenger hunt on Canva–I only use the free version, and I love it! It’s a bit more intricate than other platforms, so I typically only use it for simple things like birthday invitations or list-type projects, but if you’re super creative and tech-savvy, you would probably love it!

Our zoo has a gorgeous conservatory, so we started there. The koi fish were a main attraction for my youngest (18 months) and my oldest (10) alike, and we all marveled at their size and energy. There was also a kind employee who educated us about some of the plants featured in the conservatory, including a tree called the Theobroma cacao that has cacao pods! (Used to make cocoa powder, and therefore, chocolate!)

For our scavenger hunt, the kids had a variety of jobs, including searching for certain animals from the book (mouse, tortoise, lion, tiger, gorilla) as well as writing down interesting facts they learned. The conservatory and zoo both had great reference information for us to browse as we travelled through!

The mouse character in My Father’s Dragon has an adorable speech impediment where he mixes up the beginning letters of words. On the back of the scavenger hunt, I put a few quotes from mouse for the kids to decipher.

We were pretty excited that one of the tigers was up close for us to see, especially since a tiger was one of the characters in the book!

Lastly, I grabbed a few things on Amazon to create a special My Father’s Dragon goody bag for each kid. I included:

-a stick of gum (relates to the tigers)

-a lollipop (relates to the alligators)

-a comb (relates to the lions)

-a magnifying glass (relates to the gorillas)

-a toothbrush (relates to the rhinos)

We were thankful for the chance to be together, and discuss this darling book! The Treehouse Schoolhouse Book Club Kits have been incredible. They include weeks worth of material to talk about, projects, cooking suggestions and other goodness. These things here on this blogpost was my personal spin on it! I hope you enjoyed.

Have you ever set up a kid book club with friends? I’d love to hear about it!

Cait