Goodies with Gracie

Gracie is  a little reader.  She always has been.  We make regular trips to the public library and during the school year, I bring home books for her every time I work on Library Checkout day.  She also has a pretty extensive home library to choose from, as well.  We read books every night and oftentimes in the morning and afternoon, too. 

Usually when we go to the library, I choose a few books ahead of time. She also gets to peruse the shelves to choose books that look appealing to her.  Then I also look for books that seem like a good fit for where she's at in her reading life.  Not too long, not too short, good pictures, and nothing about things she's scared of.  The book Gladys Goes Out to Lunch by Derek Anderson was one of the random books that I grabbed for her.  This book quickly became one of her favorites from her library dozen and we read it over and over again.  She pretty much had it memorized within a few days.  But the really cool thing about Gladys was that the author included a recipe for banana bread on the last page.  Gladys the gorilla loved bananas and throughout the book she discovers that she also loves banana bread!  So I promised Gracie we'd try that recipe to see if we liked Gladys' Banana Bread, too!  It was a fun little project for the two of us on a hot summer afternoon.  

Gladys travels through the pages of the book by smelling a heavenly smell throughout the zoo.  She escapes her cage to seek out the smell and every place she stops doesn't have a food that tastes like that delicious smell.  She can't figure out what it is, until she discovers it's banana bread!  As our bread was baking, Gracie commented that she could totally understand why Gladys ran all over the zoo chasing that smell.  She thought it smelled heavenly, too!  The teacher in me was happy to see her connecting to the character... such a smart cookie!

All in all, the recipe was only so-so, but the fun we had was definitely worth it!  I plan to seek out more books that we can connect with in the future because I loved to see her excitement about extended the fun from a favorite book!