The Last Princess Day

My kids love snails. 

A lot. So much that they collect the snails in buckets. Good thing there are so many in our yard. 

They can be kinda cute, I guess. 

But not as nice as the Monarch butterfly we found Friday morning in our cage. 

Clearly, by the end of Princess Week, we were a bit distracted. 

This is what the kitchen island looked like. Messy evidence of a busy week. 

On our last day, we didn't have much left to do. Mostly wrap up everything we had learned and dabble in some fictional princesses who break the mold. 

For that, we read Paper Bag Princess and Dangerously Ever After. 

I gave the girls the option to make paper bag puppets or make paper bag dresses for themselves, but Ellie had an even better idea. She ran upstairs to get her doll, Victoria, and we outfitted the dolls in paper bags! 

Katie brought down her toy dragons, and some dramatic play followed. 

They took some creative license with the story. In their version, two dragons capture the princesses. Once freed, we made some tissue paper roses, kind of like the ones in Dangerously Ever After. 

Then we revisited our geography lesson and plotted all the princesses we learned about on a map. (We made up where the fictional ones lived.)

We reviewed all the past princesses and talked about what makes them different from a "Disney Princess" before I challenged the girls to write their own princess stories. I had a package of blank paperback books, and they would be the perfect medium for a princess story. Ellie made hers all by herself. She did a pretty good job!

Katie "wrote" a story too. I helped. She told me what to write, and we both illustrated it. It was hilarious fun. 

And that was Unconventional Princess Week! 

Given more time, energy, and interest, there are other/more things I would have done. Like watching clips from Peabody & Sherman... The one with Marie Antoinette... Maybe the parts that take place in Egypt too. Or those Backyardigans episodes: The Key to the Nile or the Luau Brothers. We probably would have made the same kind of craft each day (peg dolls of all the princesses maybe) so they could play with them all together at the end of the week... Though they kind of did that on their own with Legos. We also might have made volcano science experiments on our Hawaiian day, or made shoebox ukeleles.  We could have made dragons or a castle... Drawn our own gardens with dangerous plants... We usually end these weeks with a field trip but didn't. The Egypt exhibit at the HMNS or the Art museum would have been good. Or even venturing out to the (nasty) beach... So many more ideas and possibilities, but I think we still got some good literature, history, and geography lessons, and we adapted to our circumstances. 

And we had fun too.