Bunny Finger Puppets

Make some easy bunny finger puppets with kids and use them for all kinds of early literacy fun. Check out the bottom of the page for bunny poems, stories, and songs that preschoolers can use to make their bunny puppets come alive and practice important literacy skills at the same time.

Retelling Classic Folk Tales: Virtual Book Club for Kids

This month's Virtual Book Club for Kid's featured author is Paul Galdone, who is known for his beautifully illustrated versions of classic tales. Here are three ways we've used props to retell traditional tales. If you have your own activity to go with one of Paul Galdone's books, please link it up below.

Bear Wants More Activity: Virtual Book Club for Kids

Here's a fun and easy way to combine literacy and art while making the book Bear Wants More come to life. It was simple to put together and works great for practicing retelling skills with kids.

Little White Owl Paper Bag Puppets: Book Activity

Usually we do book activities as an extension of the book, so we do the project after we've read it. This time we did the craft first so we could use them to dramatize the story. We went old school with some paper bag puppets, but I love how they turned out because to make them fit with our book, The Little White Owl, we had to make them as sparkly and glittery and flowery and as beautiful as possible.

Paper Plate Duck Puppet: Virtual Book Club for Kids

The featured author for this month's edition of the Virtual Book Club for Kids is Jez Alborough. Link up your Jez Alborough book projects and find more ideas below.

Many of Jez Alborough's books feature the hapless and zany Duck as the main character. We chose two of the books in his Duck series to read this month. We also made a simple puppet from a paper plate to retell the stories.

Paper Plate Mouse: Virtual Book Club for Kids

In preparation for this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids we checked out all the Leo Lionni books we could find from the library.  The ones that were available that day seemed to have a common theme - almost every book we checked out had a mouse as the main character.

Shadow Play with The Gruffalo's Child: Virtual Book Club for Kids

The featured author for the March edition of the Virtual Book Club for Kids is Julia Donaldson. Link up your Julia Donaldson book projects and find more ideas below.

Ten on the Sled: Number Recognition and Counting

My kids love the song "Ten in the Bed", so I knew they would like the book Ten on the Sled by Kim Norman.  Ten animals pile on the sled for a wild ride, but one by one they fall off!

Make Your Own Cardboard Castle {Recycling}

When we went to visit my sister for Thanksgiving, my son played for hours with a cardboard castle that my nephew had built.  I promised him that we'd make our own.  And he didn't forget my promise.   I procrastinated for a while because we didn't have enough boxes saved, but when they starting flowing from their corner in the dining room to other parts of the house I knew it was time to quit stalling and just make it.

Ways to Recreate a Story: Kid's Co-op

A great way to encourage kids to love reading and to improve their comprehension is to have them retell the story in a fun and imaginative way.  I was thrilled to see such great ideas for recreating a story at last week's Kid's Co-op:

Old Bear 4 Seasons Craft: August Virtual Book Club

Old Bear by Kevin Henkes is the perfect book to talk about the four seasons with kids. For our Virtual Book Club project, we made a simple seasons craft to use with the book. Be sure to check out the other ideas for Kevin Henkes books below.

Magic Beans

The most amazing thing happened the other day.  We were reading our copy of Jack & the Beanstalk when I suddenly remembered seeing a packet of magic beans in our junk drawer.

Scissor Practice and a Red Ripe Strawberry: July Virtual Book Club

In preparation for the July Summer Virtual Book Club, I checked out lots of Don and Audrey Wood's books from the library, but the one that the kids asked me to read over and over was The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear.  In fact, they had it memorized in the first four days we had it. The narrator follows a little mouse who is going to pick a red, ripe strawberry.  The narrator warns the mouse that the big hungry bear loves red ripes strawberries and will come looking for it no matter how the mouse tries to hide, disguise, or guard it. The narrator tells the mouse that the only way to keep himself safe from the bear is to cut the strawberry in half so they can share it. 

Natural Ice Boats

When I first saw ice boats made with drinking straws and paper sails, I knew my kids would love them.  But since we wanted to float them on a lake, I had to come up with a way to make them that wouldn't leave litter behind.

Barnyard Tornado in a Jar and Books about Tornadoes

The best part about this activity was that a lot of it was my four year old's idea.

The 3 Little Pigs Retelling

3 Activities for Rainbow Fish

The Rainbow Fish is a classic.  In case you haven't read it, it's about the Rainbow Fish, the most beautiful fish in the ocean because of his shining silver scales.  He's lonely, though, and eventually learns that while sharing his scales with the other fish makes him less beautiful, it also makes him more happy.

 

We did three activities to go along with this book (hope you've got yourself some tin foil!)

Feed the Very Hungry Caterpillar & Printable

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of our very favorite books.  The part that we all like best is the food.  Usually, we make play dough shapes to match the food, but I wanted to try something a little different this time.

Interrupting Chicken Finger Puppet

We have a couple of little chickens around here who like to interrupt, especially during bedtime stories when all the stops are pulled out to prolong the moment before lights out. I do have to admit that as a reading teacher, I encourage interruptions during stories.  There's nothing better than realizing that there's some thinking and questioning going on while we're reading.  It drives my husband nuts though (he's more of a just-get-through-the-story kind of guy), so Interrupting Chicken was a cute story for us.

It's about a little red chicken who interrupts every bedtime story her papa tries to read her.  It's comical because she will burst into the middle of a story like Chicken Little and yell, "It's just an acorn!  Don't worry about it!"  Eventually the little red chicken tells her papa a story and puts him to sleep.  As a parent, I suspect his falling asleep had more to do with sheer exhaustion than the actual bedtime story.

 I wanted to make a cute prop to go with this.  I started with one of these party things:

I took off the cardboard decoration and taped on eyes and a beak.

The idea was for the kids to use them as finger puppets.

And also to blow them during the story when the little red chicken interrupts.

Of course, what ended up happening is that they blew these things all during the story and barely paid attention to anything else.  Ah well.