As Mr. Horse clip-clops along other animals ask him for a ride. What happens when he starts running too fast?

Read this fun book with your child and have them repeat the refrain “clip-clop” each time it appears on the page, saying it faster and faster as the horse goes faster. If your child is too young to say the words themselves, bounce them on your lap as you say them. Dip them to the side when the animals fall off. This is a fun way to adapt the book to many ages and meet your child’s development stage.

The large font and repeated refrain provide a great opportunity to help your child develop print awareness. Point to the words “Clip-clop” as you say them together.

Talk about the different animals on each page. Have the kids use their background knowledge about animals to tell you what sound they make. Learning and making animal sounds helps children learn to recognize the smaller sounds that make up words. This skill is called phonological awareness and will later help them sound out words as they learn to read.

When the horse starts going too fast, ask your child what they think will happen. Predicting events in a story helps children develop their narrative skills.

Extend the book with a pool noodle horse!

After reading the book, help your child make a pool noodle horse they can clip-clop around on themselves.

Fold over the top half of the pool noodle and tie it down. Then use yarn, googly eyes, fabric, and any other materials you have lying around to decorate.

Play is an important part of a child’s development. Galloping around on the horse encourages whole body play, which is necessary for children to develop large motor skills, explore the world around them, and read social clues when playing with other children.

This book will help build:

• Letter knowledge - it has large font and clear letters
• Print awareness
• Phonological awareness - it has rhyming text and alliteration
• Vocabulary
• Narrative Skills
• Background knowledge - touches on winter animal activities like hibernation and migration. The content is interesting and makes reading fun!

This book will help kids practice:

• Talking
• Reading

Extend the book with an ice painting activity!

You will need:

• Paint

• Small paper cups or ice cube trays

• Craft sticks (optional)

• A freezer

• Paper

First, dilute and freeze your paint.

I used washable, child-friendly, nontoxic tempera paint. I put some into a tiny paper cup. Then I added water and stirred it up with a craft stick.

Use a separate cup for each color. If you’d like to make things less messy, freeze a craft stick in the cup as well, so that it sticks up from the paint, making a handle. Ice cube trays also work very well for this.

Tip: If your stick won’t stay upright, try using tape or rubber bands to hold it in place.

Once frozen, they resemble ice pops. Just peel away the cup, or pop them out of their tray, and you’re ready to start painting.

I made a nature scene out of construction paper. Green triangles make trees. White ice paint puts “snow” into the picture.

This is very tactile, sensory experience.  It gives a hands-on opportunity to explore science, and it  helps build fine-motor skills.  

You can also just use these ice paints to draw anything you want.
[Picture here:  Blue heart]

This book helps kids build:

Print Motivation: This one is just plain silly! It can help make reading fun.

Print Awareness: The printing is part of the story; the cows’ notes in the pictures draw attention to print.

Narrative Skills: Plot twist ahead! Can you guess what will happen next?

Phonological Awareness: This book is full of onomatopoeia, which emphasizes sounds.

Background Knowledge: This book will build on knowledge of farms and animals.

This book helps kids practice:

Talking: This book offers the chance to talk about farm animals.

Reading: Reading happens on two levels: reading the book, and reading the notes within the book.

Playing: Go ahead and play! Make animal noises along with the characters. Have fun!

Extend the book with an animal game!

Print out this die template and color it with different animal pictures. If you prefer, practice letter knowledge and vocabulary by writing out the names of the animals instead.

Cut out the shape, and fold along the edges of the squares. The black pieces make tabs that can be glued or adhered with double-stick tape.

Feel free to print on stiff paper or card stock if you wish. That said, I only used regular cellophane tape on normal computer paper, and it worked just fine for me.

Now roll the die and make the sound of the animal it lands on! You can also pretend to be that animal.

Illustrated by Sophie Fatus

This singable story is inspired by a Chilean folktale and will help kids practice singing and talking. This is a great book for building phonological awareness, background knowledge, narrative skills, and vocabulary.

Sing and count along as a young boy collects new pets for his farm two by two.

Practice counting skills, storytelling skills, baby animal vocabulary, and learn a bit about Chilean culture through the bright and playful illustrations.

Here’s a video you can watch to learn the tune of the song:

Practice counting by 2’s with this fun activity!

Each time the book reads “How I love my [number] little pets,” write the number on a piece of tape.

Tape the number to a pipe cleaner or piece of string.

Count out a matching number of beads and string them onto the pipe cleaner or string.

Use this activity to practice counting by 2’s. Can you count up to 16 with the book? Can you count all the way up to 20?

Use this activity to practice counting by 2’s. Can you count up to 16 with the book? Can you count all the way up to 20?

This playful story follows the antics of Hoot Owl, who tries to use his wits to catch his meal. This book is a joy to read aloud.

It is not written in verse, but the prose uses some rhymes and repeats certain consonants. This not only gives it a distinctive sound, but it builds your child’s phonological awareness, helping him or her to hear the smaller individual sounds within words. This book also contains a rich vocabulary, introducing your child to a wider variety of words than would be found in ordinary speech.

The story is funny, and kids will enjoy the way that the owl’s version doesn’t always match the pictures. This awareness of the plot is called narrative skills. Here, kids use the words and the pictures to find out what is happening; this ability helps them make sense of what they read. They may also be able to predict what happens next.

Extend the book with a pizza! Well, not a real pizza.

This felt pizza can work as a flannel board activity, a prop for a puppet, or even a game.  Here, I stuck the pieces to a blanket and had my wizard puppet “eat” it.

Kids can build a pizza piece by piece, starting with the dough:

“This is the pizza that  [child’s name]  made.”

Then comes the sauce:

“This is the sauce that goes on the pizza … ”

Next, add whatever other shapes you want. I used white triangles for cheese, green rectangles for pepper, and brown circles for sausage.  

Saying the poem has some of the same benefits as singing, and the pizza offers a great way to play. It also opens up the chance to talk about the pizza, about the owl in the story, about what sorts of things are good to eat—there is no limit to where this conversation can go! Bonus: handling the little shapes provides an opportunity for fine motor development, so building the pizza is a good precursor to writing.

The repetition in The Napping House by Audrey Wood can help with phonological awareness because the child is hearing the words over and over. The repetition also gives the books a sing-song quality. Hearing this rhythm of language when you read with your child also contributes to phonological awareness. If you choose to read the book again or do the following craft, your child should now have the background knowledge to anticipate what will happen next and why.

Learn About Story Patterns

Grab these free printables from Kiz Club. You can get them in color or black and white. I printed the black and white version and colored it myself, as is shown in the pictures. With these pieces, you can use narrative skills to retell the story and talk about what happened or what will happen next.

by Jon Stone

Enjoy the giggles and excitement as you read about Grover trying to avoid the monster at the end of the book. Vocabulary, narrative skills and print awareness are just a few of the skills your child will experience through all of the talking, reading and playing that will take place as you go through the story.

Talking: Grover goes through a lot of emotions during the story. Point out what Grover is doing on each page. Ask questions like: What is Grover doing? Is he upset? What makes you think that?

Reading: The word Monster is emphasized on several pages. Have your child point it out as they see it. What other words around them do they recognize? Stop on stop signs, their favorite food, their name, etc.

Playing: Take turns making faces and naming the emotion your face is implying.

You can also try building a wall like Grover does out of Lego bricks, building blocks, pillows, etc. and knock it over, just like in the book. Another correlating game to try is: hide and seek.

by Rosanna Battigelli

A family of cats prepares for some Halloween fun with pumpkins! Pumpkin picking, pumpkin carving, pumpkins everywhere!

This book is a great read for beginning readers. Every page is full of rhyming words to help with phonological awareness. You and your young reader(s) can sing the story for a little more fun! This develops narrative skills to strengthen spoken and written language.

This book has vocabulary words like gleaming, glow, and glaring, just to name a few. This is a great book for some Halloween word fun!

Extend the book: Coffee Filter Jack O’ Lantern

Supplies:

• Coffee Filter
• glue
• Makers
• Wet Paper Towel
• Construction paper

Instructions:

Color the coffee filter. I used orange, but you can make your pumpkin any color.

Take a wet paper towel and dab the water all over the coffee filter.

Let the coffee filter dry. In the meantime, cut shapes for the face of the jack o’ lantern and the stem for it.

Once the filter is dried, glue the shapes and stem to the pumpkin.

Decorate your favorite space with your coffee filter pumpkin!

ALT

This book builds:

Print motivation: Because birthdays are fun, and so is this book!

Vocabulary: This rich vocabulary includes words such as “croon” and “fluorescent.”

Print Awareness: From top to bottom, left to right, this book’s printed words—in varying styles, differing sizes, and unusual positions—all reinforce the basic mechanics of a book.

Narrative skills: The words are the ten rules. The stories are all in the pictures. Interpreting images to understand a story is key to reading comprehension.

Phonological Awareness: Strong use of alliteration draws attention to sounds in words.

Letter Knowledge: A large font makes big letters easy to see and recognize.

Background Knowledge: Kids will draw on their own experiences to engage with this book.

This book helps kids practice:

Talking: This is a great book for conversation, as it suggests many open-ended options for birthday celebrations.

Singing: Yes, there is singing involved. It’s the “Happy Birthday” song, of course!

Reading: Plenty of that here, with large font, big letters, and a fun premise.

Writing: This book involves counting on fingers, a fine motor skill that prefigures writing.

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Playing: Close your eyes. Make a wish. Play right along with the story.

Extend the book with a wish jar!

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These are ordinary jars, a mix of plastic and glass. I took one and decorated it with crêpe paper streamers, ribbon, and colorful stickers.

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The wish jar is for keeping track of all your wishes. Just write* your wish on a piece of paper, fold it up, and drop it in the wish jar.

*If your child is too young to write, that’s okay! Anything goes here, so drawing a picture, writing someone’s initials, decorating the paper in your favorite colors are all wonderful alternatives. The point is that there is something on the paper to stand for the wish.

This idea, that something can be symbolized on paper, is the single basic principle of writing. If your child understands that a word or letter or picture has meaning, then your child has grasped a vital pre-literacy skill.

The Rainbow Snail is a brightly illustrated picture book with easy-to-read text that is great for teaching colors to toddlers and preschoolers.

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We follow the charming snail and discover all the colors of the rainbow. This book promotes vocabulary and background knowledge.

This book also encourages talking and playing as you describe the different colors of the rainbow: blue like the raindrops, green like the grass and yellow like the sun.

Extend this book by making a rocking rainbow snail

What you will need:

• paper plate
• white, black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple construction paper
• scissors
• tape or glue
• black paint

1. Fold the paper plate in half.
2. Paint the plate black to match the snail in the book.
3. Cut out paper circles making the red one the biggest and purple the smallest.
4. Cut out black strips. Cut out white and black circles for the eyes.
5. Glue or tape pieces together.
6. Glue or tape the circles and the eyes on the plate.

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