As a Childminder in Northern Ireland there are particular courses I must take and qualifications that I must have. There are also courses that are not required but are offered to people who work in childcare; nursery schools, day cares, as well as us childminders who work from home. Some of these courses I find to be quite interesting and I have attended a few over the past two years. One such course was on Storytelling. We were split into groups and each group was given a book and we were to come up with ideas to make the book more interesting and take the book outside of ‘story time’. The book my group had was called “Aliens in Underpants Save The World” by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort. We had so much fun in this class that on our next trip to the library we asked them to have the book sent over from another area of the country for us.
Aliens in Underpants Save The World is a cute book in which the earth is at danger from a meteor strike. These little aliens don’t want the earth to be destroyed as they like to visit from time to time to snatch underwear for their own use. This is what happens to your underwear when it goes missing from the wash line, your drawer, etc!
How do the Aliens save the world? By using every pair of underwear they can get their hands on and sew them together to make a big canopy to bounce the meteor off of!
This sounded like something fun to do, so we set about re-creating this moment-before impact.
We used a globe ball to represent earth. We didn’t want to sew up all of our underwear together, so we decided we would use a tea towel instead.
A piece of tin foil crumpled into a ball made a good meteor.
We were set! The kitchen was a little too small for our activities, so we moved outside and tried it out…would it work? Could we save the ‘earth’?
Lets give it a try! Tristan and I held our canopy over the ‘earth’ and Kallista threw the tin foil meteor towards it. Tristan and I were able to deflect the meteor and save the earth from certain destruction! It can indeed be done!
To explain a little about meteorites and the damage they can cause during and after an impact I went up into our attic and found some postcards and photos from a trip I went on to Meteor Crater in Arizona, the best preserved meteor crater on earth.
And this is what my experience looked like. We were able to walk down int0 the crater itself.
There is an Apollo space test capsule there you can get close up to! How cool!
There are also samples of meteors that you can get up close to and examine. The large piece here weighs more than a car!
I hope that someday I will be able to take my family to see this beautiful area of the world in person, but in the meantime it’s nice to have some photos and stories to share with them to try to make books come alive and their imaginations travel. Today the world is small and it needs to be saved…
We’ve also made an underpants matching game, click here to find out more about it.
If you like the idea of bringing books to life with your children, we have learned about foods through Handa’s Surprise, and had fun with The Gingerbread Man.
Do you enjoy bringing life to stories?
