Book Clubs: That's Gross!

For this month's book clubs (I run K-2 then 3rd-5th clubs back to back), I decided to do things that were gross. I pulled a whole bunch of books that we had based on the following search terms: gross, yuck, slime, disgusting, pee, farts, and poop. It was like a third grade boy's favorite Google search terms. 

I did find a whole bunch of books, though! Unfortunately, none of them were Grossology cause I guess that one gets checked out a lot. Well, that just means I don't have to promote it! 

I started by reading: Yikes! Your Body up Close by Mike Janulewicz. 

I didn't read the whole thing, just enough to gross everyone out (giant photos of lice, anyone?). I do wish the flaps had a better reveal of what you are looking at - they just show more magnified parts which you still have to decipher. The skin photo was cool, though. 

We then moved to the table to make dirt cake. I love making dirt cake with the kids. Take oreos, remove the inside stuff, and smash them. Make chocolate pudding. Put a gummy worm in the chocolate pudding and add the crushed oreos on top and I swear it looks like you're spooning up dirt. Delicious, easy, loads of kid appeal, and it involves smashing things. It never ever fails. 

Then we went to craft time: SLIME. 

We ended with slime because it was the messiest and because it invites extended play. The best recipe is from Steve Spangler Science and uses glue and borax. I've been making this particular concoction for years and it's super squishy and gross and fun to play with - definitely a winner.

Slime Ingredients

Slime as boogers. 

Though I didn't make it this time I've also made a fun-to-moosh-around slime out of cornstarch and water. You mix the two until you have a liquid-y type thing which hardens when you squeeze it: 

And when you let go it goes all liquid-y again. It's fascinating... 

 ...but rather difficult to clean up. 

I was going to teach my older kids the "Great Green Globs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" song, but they were a little hyper and I didn't want to add fuel to the fire. It would have been so awesome, though...

I'd say this topic was very successful with both age groups. The Wee Book of Pee definitely elicited some giggles and several people were curious about how toilets work (thank god for David Macaulay!). I also had a pretty high check-out rate for the books that I had pulled, which pleased me.