Yesterday’s holiday means a short post today. So! I thought I would share my absolute most favorite literary find, ever. Thems who knows me can confirm – I am a yard sale fanatic. I spot a yard sale arrow, the car comes to a screeching halt, and I execute a tidy little 3-point turn in a cloud of road dust. Why? Because I find treasures like the one you see above.
Yes, it may look like a four volume set of the “Complete Works of William Shakespeare,” but this is, in fact, a mini liquor cabinet, complete with a glass decanter for your brandy. HOW CRAZY COOL IS THAT???
I pounced on this many years ago. It cost me $5. Alas, the shot glasses that accompanied the set were missing from the get go, but my little motorized mouse has found a comfortable home there.
Note: I haven’t actually filled the bottle with brandy. Nor have I even tasted brandy (I know, right?). The running joke is that I’ll toast the publication of my first children’s novel with a big glassful of it. Someday…!
The baseball cap is a trimmed paper bowl with a card stock (or construction paper) brim. We recommend using hot glue to attach the hat and the feet to the oatmeal container.
The baseball hat is just one optional for headgear of course. We basically gave the kids a bowl, a strip of white construction paper “shirt” and the 
When everyone was done decorating, we played a game of Hot/Cold Hide-and-Seek. Kids hid their apes around our 
We recommend Rub-a-Dub Sub, written by Linda Ashman, and illustrated by Jeff Mack (Harcourt, 2003). Zooming around in an orange submarine, a little boy encounters numerous ocean creatures – a seal, a manta ray, a horseshoe crab, and an eel to name a few! But an encounter with an enormous shark forces him to quickly retrace his steps to the surface, where he finds himself safe and sound – in his very own bathtub.
Next, turn the cups end-to-end and connect them together with hot glue. If you can’t do hot glue, simply connect the cups with tape. We used black masking tape for the photo below, but regular tape works just as well.
For the paper towel tube version of the project, cut the holes in the bottoms of the cups. Then place a piece of paper towel tube inside the bottom cup (our tube piece was 6.75″ long but you might have to adjust yours a little). Place the second cup over top of the first…
Then hot glue (or tape) the two cups together. So…is the extra effort for the paper towel version worth it? You decide! Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the 2 projects. One could argue that the paper towel tube version looks more like a spyglass, but the cups-only version is cute too.
Next, cut a periscope shape out of construction paper, tab the bottom, and attach the periscope to the top of the sub. Finally, use markers to give your sub portholes, plates, rivets, and bolts. Any markers will do, but we really liked how silver metallic marker looked on the black paper cups.
Miss Marissa designed this awesome project, and she made a fantastic I-Spy game to go with it! To play, print up the characters in this template (click 