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]

The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) by Philemon Sturges is a fun, silly book for all pizza lovers. The little red hen decides she wants to make a delicious pizza but finds herself in need of the necessary ingredients. Who will help her? After repeatedly hearing the phrase, “Not I!” from the dog, duck, and cat, readers will be delighted and amused by the ending.

Practices and Skills:

This story allows children the opportunity to talk aloud, teaching them narrative skills. Ask your children to guess what ingredients the little red hen will buy next or how the other animals in story will respond to her requests for help. Talking aloud also facilitates phonological awareness—the way a word sounds. Children will learn new words and at the same time predict the outcome of the little red hen’s shopping trips.

The story also fosters vocabulary and background knowledge. Children will laugh at the many ingredients the little red hen forgets each time she visits the store as well as learn about the many toppings that can be added to a pizza. Ask your children to name their favorite pizza toppings and what other toppings can be added to the pizza. They will learn more about what makes pizza such a popular food among people—and hens!

Activity:

Children can use their imaginations by playing. Encourage them to create their own pizzas using felt or construction paper. You can find an “order form” at:   http://overthebigmoon.com/movie-and-pizza-family-night-idea-w-printable-order-forms/

The possibilities are endless as children add more and more toppings to their pizzas!

Say hello to many amazing, colorful animals. Hello Hello by Brendan Wenzel is a great book for building Print Motivation. Print Motivation means making reading fun, and this book is fun!

While looking at the illustrations, notice how each animal shares something in common with the one on either side of it. Then, as you turn the pages, see how one animal leads you onto the next page. After reading the book with your child, check out the animal key in the back of the book. This is a great opportunity to learn the names of the creatures that we share this Earth with, especially those that are threatened or endangered. Learning the names of these animals increases your child’s vocabulary.

Extend the book with a paper plate snake craft!

We got this idea from craftymorning.com. Check them out for more detailed instructions, more pictures, and even more fun bubble wrap paint ideas. Here’s how our snake turned out!

You’ll need:

• bubble wrap
• a rolling pin
• a paper plate
• paint (we used green, but snakes come in lots of colors!)
  
• scissors
• googly eyes
• red ribbon or felt

First we wrapped the rolling pin in bubble wrap and squirted green paint out onto a flat surface (notice that we laid down cellophane to help with cleanup!)

Let your kids roll the rolling pin through the paint and then roll it over the plate. Leave it to dry (good opportunity to read a book!). When it’s dry, cut the plate in a spiral.

The middle of the plate will be your head, so feel free to shape it with the scissors! That’s where you’ll glue the eyes and the ribbon for the tongue.

Pick up the snake by the head and bounce around the house (or the library in this case!)

Gerald the giraffe wants nothing more than to dance like the other animals. But, his legs are too skinny and his knees buckle when he tries to prance, twirl and dance. At the Jungle Dance, the animals are very unkind to Gerald and make fun of his dance moves. A violin playing cricket helps him listen and feel a different kind of music.

Use alliteration!

Warthogs and waltzing and rhinos and rock ‘n roll are examples of alliteration. Take turns making up others such as koalas doing karate, hipposhiccuping. Thinking out loud is a great way to develop early literacy skills.

Build vocab with dancing words!

Put on some fun music and encourage your child to listen and move with the music. Call out some of the movement words from the book like sway, shuffle, skip, prance, etc.  Children who have larger vocabularies are better readers and playing is the best way to learn language!

This book is also available on Scholastic BookFlix, so you can watch the story while you read. It’s adorable! Just go to our online resources for parents page, click Scholastic BookFlix, and login with your card number and PIN. (If you’re not an LCPL full access card holder, check with your local library to see if they offer BookFlix!)

Make a dancing Gerald

If your kid can’t get enough of this book, extend the story with this cute dancing Gerald craft from Teaching Ideas. 

Print the pieces here

Color them in and cut them out (your child may need help cutting!)

Glue the head, neck, and tail to the body.

Attach the legs to the body with small, brass fasteners so Gerald can dance any way he wants!

Look at all this traffic! Follow along as each vehicle drives off in their own unique style. Toot Toot Beep Beep by Emma Garcia is a great book for kids getting ready to read. Practice colors and pronunciation along the way as you see what their final destination is at the end of the day.

This book is a great vocabulary builder: it contains action words kids may not often hear. It’ll also help build print awareness with its repeated text and special words in bold print. Taking notice of these words and pointing them out will help your child practice reading.

Toot Toot Beep Beep helps kids practice talking, too. While you read, have fun encouraging your child to pronounce the different vehicle sounds.

Extend the book with play

Kids do a lot of their learning while playing! Gather up some toy cars to play with after you read the book. You can build a road on the ground out of tape or blocks.

For a fun game to play with numbers and cars, plus some neat rhymes to talk about the colors of cars, check out Jbrary’s blog post on Toot Toot Beep Beep!

This time of year, kids will see pumpkins everywhere! It’s Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall is a great book to show kids how pumpkins grow. In this book, a brother and sister plant a “jack-o’-lantern patch and tend to it step by step, until it’s time to pick their pumpkins and carve them for Halloween. 

The story provides a perfect opportunity to introduce narrative skills. The story shows the sequence in which a pumpkin grows, from planting the seeds to cutting the pumpkin from the vine. Ask your child questions about the story like: “What do you think will happen after they plant the seeds?” or “What does the pumpkin need to grow?” At the end of the book, you will find step by step pictures illustrating how the pumpkin grows, which gives you a perfect chance to talk about the story and practice sequencing and narrative skills with your child.

Your child will also learn background knowledge. If you go back and read the story again, ask your child to tell you what is happening in the story. Your child will practice telling a story, which teaches her how stories work. She will also learn about gardening, which teaches her more about the world around her.

After reading this story, it’s a great time to go out to a pumpkin patch and pick a pumpkin together, or you can make a pumpkin patch of your own with the fun craft below.

Make a Pumpkin!

You will need:

• Orange Construction Paper
  
• Yellow Construction Paper
  
• Orange Yarn
  
• Scissors
  
• Green and Black Markers (or Crayons)
  
• Glue
  
• Stapler

1: Cut two pumpkins out of the orange paper and make a Jack-O-Lantern face on one.

2: Take the yellow paper and cut out pumpkin seeds.  (If you have real pumpkin seeds use them!)

3: Cut some short strings from the orange yarn and glue them onto the other pumpkin with the seeds.

4: When the pumpkin dries, staple both pumpkins together on one side, like a pumpkin book!

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.

Ah Ha! by Jeff Mack tells a whole story using only two words, Ah and Ha. You can say these words different ways to mean different things.

Read the book together, letting your child tell what they see happening. When you have your child tell stories from pictures, you are promoting their narrative skills. Talking and giving their own ideas helps them understand what you are reading and how stories follow a structure. Follow the words with your finger to show your child that the words have meaning. This helps them grasp the concept of print awareness.

Five Green and Speckled Frogs

After reading Ah Ha! sing “Five Green and Speckled Frogs” with your child. This fun song helps children learn how to count and understand the concept of sequencing. Learning that things happen in a certain order is a part of developing narrative skills.

“Five Green and Speckled Frogs”

Five green and speckled frogs sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – YUM YUM!
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there were four green and speckled frogs.

(Continue counting down.)

You can even make this fun craft inspired by Mel’s Desk to go along with the song.

Cut strips of paper and staple them around a paper towel tube. Print five frogs (you can source your frogs from anywhere, or draw them if you like) and let your child cut out and color them. Glue them to the paper and then have your child color water on the other side of the paper. Sing the song, flipping over a frog each time one jumps in the water.

If you need more detailed instructions, check out Mel’s Desk!

The shapes in Shapes, Reshape! by Silvia Borando get all mixed up and it is up to the reader to guess what animal the shapes will turn into on the next page, which makes it a very fun guessing game for preschoolers!

Do you know what buzzy things the shapes will reshape into?

Ten dragonflies, flittering and fluttering!

This is a great counting book that also encourages shape recognition and vocabulary building. That big text helps children recognize words when they see them for the first time in print. This book encourages talking since it is asking the reader to come up with suggestions as to what the shapes could reshape into.

Children will enjoy the repetition in the text of “What could they be?” after each hint. The text is simple and follows a pattern: The first sentence gives a hint as to what the shapes will make once they are reassembled. Each answer is brief and includes a few alliterative descriptive words to describe each of the eleven different animals featured in the book.

Extend the book with animal shapes!

Supplies needed:
Construction paper (various colors)
Scissors
Glue stick
White paper

1. Cut out a bunch of shapes (squares, rectangles, triangles, circles) of various sizes and colors.

2. Rearrange the shapes until you think it resembles a type of animal.

Hey look, a moose!

You can make this a game by continuously rearranging the shapes to make more and more animals or you could glue each animal to a blank white sheet of paper.

Some of the first stages of writing involve drawing pictures and then telling stories about what the pictures represent; encourage a child’s narrative skills by saying, “Tell me about this picture!” or “What’s happening in this picture?”

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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