There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

"What do you normally do when a fly is buzzing around you?"  That's the question I posed to my son and his three friends a couple of days ago when they came over to hang out.  In unison they began to make fanning the air in front of their faces.  "Oh!  So you shoo them away?"  They nodded.  "Well," I continued, "does anyone ever try to swat the fly?"  I slapped the couch with my hand for emphasis.  Laughing, they all nodded again, and I began my introduction to the book I planned on using.

 
Showing them the book cover I proceeded, "Well this book is not about a woman who shooed a fly, and it's not about a woman who swatted a fly--this book is about an old woman who swallowed a fly.  I gulped a good amount of air for dramatic emphasis, and it worked.  "Ewwwwwwww," they said altogether.

I showed them the back of the book and we marveled at just how many types of flies there are in the world:

Then we read the story, which is incredibly entertaining albeit a bit insensitive to the concept of death (the old lady kicks the bucket at the end of the story after eating a horse--and then there are all kinds of rhymes used to comment on the death--i.e. "I'm filled with remorse!"  "It was her last course!"  "It is such a loss!"  "She had no time to floss!")  I'm into that kind of humor, and it turns out kids are, too.  They loved it, and were ready to make an accompanying craft (which was, as you might guess, a fly).

I traced each kid's footprint

and they colored the footprints in

We all agreed flies can be black, but they don't necessarily have to be

We added six legs, and learned that's the number of legs that all insects have

I grabbed some oven paper from the kitchen

and cut out a few wings--eight to be exact

Two for everyone

Too cute to swallow.