Bringing Farm Books to Life

After a decade of collecting children's books, I have quite a few, so I'm usually able to find some books in my stash that work with our theme. Sometimes we also get books from the library to go with what we're doing, but this time we had enough on hand. Trip loves to have me read to him, but he has his favorite books, and isn't always interested in me introducing new ones. This has been getting better recently, but he has to be in the right mood. With a little work, I was able to read him all of these books and he has discovered a couple of new favorites.

We also brought these books to life by acting them out while we read. Trip's bath toys came in handy for Five Little Ducks. We had the mother duck and her five little ducks.

This is a great book for practicing some simple math concepts. The five ducklings go away. Only four come back. The four go away, and then three come back. This continues until no ducklings come home. The mother goes looking for them and they all come back. This concept was still a little difficult for Trip, but using the rubber duckies helped.

Going to Sleep on the Farm is a beautiful book in which a little boy is picking up his toy animals before bedtime and asks his dad how each animal goes to sleep. This is definitely one of Trip's new favorite books and he enjoyed putting each of the animals to bed in the barn.

 

The Grumpy Morning is a cute story about a day when the farmer slept in. The animals have been complaining that they are hungry so they march into the house to wake up the sleepy farmer.

Trip helped line up the animals and make their hungry noises.

Bringing books to life by acting them out with toys (or puppets, paper cut-outs, stuffed animals, etc.) is a great way to get little ones more involved in reading and to give them a love for books.