Funday Friday: Favorite Stories in Action, A Playful Story Stretcher

It's Funday Friday here. Generally speaking, that's the one day a week (other than weekends) that we come downstairs still in our pajamas in the morning. I still do homeschool activities, but our pace is a bit more playful and child-led as we get ready for Shabbos in the evening. Acting out favorite children's books is one of my favorite story stretching activities. I've mentioned the book, Is It Shabbos Yet? by Ellen Emerman before and it truly is a favorite among many children, particularly the one living in this house! The story is told from Friday morning when a little girl, Malkie, wakes up already asking if it's Shabbos yet. Her mother responds to this question throughout the day with "not yet," and invites her little one to help her with all of the many Shabbos preparations.
I've done activities with preschool classes to re-write children's names into the story and have them act out the steps to getting ready for Shabbos. As much as we adults can find the chores of cleaning, shopping, cooking and preparing for Shabbos to be daunting and sometimes even overwhelming, children inherently LOVE to help adults with these tasks and there are many ways in which even the youngest of hands can help. My son is no exception to this rule. He loves to clean and help in the kitchen. He doesn't always love actual shopping trips, but he does love to pretend about them in his toy kitchen area. We have a variety of plush, plastic and real Shabbos artifacts that he can play with and pretend with to act out the rituals of lighting candles, making kiddush, setting the table and having a Shabbos meal. He asks for Shabbos with the same eagerness as Malkie does (only usually beginning on Sunday morning and not Friday!), and so today when he brought me Is It Shabbos Yet? to be read aloud for the umpteenth time this week alone, I decided we would make a playacting activity of it.
Although we've done this activity before (we even did a Pesach version last spring), he was so excited to do it again today. Here's a few shots of the fun--wishing you all happy playing, acting, story telling and a wonderful weekend ahead!

Helping to clean for Shabbos! 

Shopping for Shabbos--adding a large recycled paper bag added a whole new element of excitement to playing in his kitchen set today!

Playdough Challah Station: when I am baking fresh challah, he's always the first in line to help, but for weeks I am not baking, playdough is a wonderful way to play about it. (Please forgive the purple color!)