Kids’ Book Club: Up the Rhine to Switzerland!
Book for this month’s kids’ book club: The Overall Boys in Switzerland (This link is for the kindle or hardback version. DO NOT buy the paper book! I did and immediately returned it. It was terrible! No pictures, tiny print. I ended up just printing a pdf of this Google ebook.)
This book is a sequel to this reading primer. I don’t know if I’d actually read it again. My daughter loved it, but it was really basic. So, not really a classic. Just old. 🙂 But, it’s great as a secondary reader. And, it’s a great informative story.
We had a Swiss book club get together, so a mix of a few things from The Overall Boys and other things related to just Switzerland. This one had somewhere between 30 and 50 parents and kids, so there were A LOT of activities.
I found a super cute printout for making their own little knapsacks. you can’t see the back, but there are two “straps.”
My husband drew mountain ranges around our whole backyard.
Arrows and apples for the William Tell story.
Make a snowman! This is a super cute activity. A sock filled with rice makes a cute little snowman.
A “snowball fight” — these actually worked really well. I happened to have a roll of saran wrap that a friend gave me, so I wasn’t too worried about using it all.
We had a soap carving station. Ivory soap is the best to use.
I set up a soccer station. Nothing more Swiss than soccer…well, chocolate maybe and watches. 🙂
I thought this was a cool activity. I happened to have some old Swiss calendars for them to make them into mountains. Some kids did their own thing and made them into horns. 🙂 Then they just cut off the bottom, flipped it over and made a mini mountain to make the snow cap. (If you are like me and have a really hard time figuring out how to make these, watch this. 🙂 I didn’t cut them into triangles, just held the one end and rolled the paper.
One of the activities was to decorate a walking stick. We took a few hikes the weeks before and gathered a bunch of sticks. I gave them tape and ribbons. They went to town and loved it!! There were a couple kids who played with them all week. 🙂
Once they finished their hiking sticks, they went on a hike.
Halfway there, I had some goat milk in a cooler to try and some chocolate.
The hike led them to my parents house around the corner. My dad is Swiss, so I asked for their help. And boy did they come through!!
My dad made his delicious rosti — three types! You can see they had the backyard set up.
My dad set up his Swiss map as well for all the kid to look at.
I got some real Ovomaltine.
And set up a little breakfast table with Ovomaltine (milk and almond milk options), and some sopf.
Making their own cow bell — I left it up to them how to make theirs. Their cow bell could also become a wind chime when they got home. I got these bells.
Some fun things to play with.
There are a few more stations that I didn’t get photos for. You can find the descriptions in the directions pdf.
There were a few questionable parts in the story. Here’s the email I sent out to the parents as soon as I realized others might want to skip these parts like we did. Overall Boys Head’s Up
For my inspiration, more ideas and resources for a more in depth look at the book, see my Book Theme: Overall Boys in Switzerland and Country Study: Switzerland Pinterest Boards.
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