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.

I Week- Books

We had several fun books to include in I week. I had collected some "I Spy" books during my days in the classroom and Trip has become somewhat interested in them. He likes the pages that contain anything sports-related. I'm pretty sure that he can identify all of the basketballs, baseballs, or any other balls in each of the books he has seen. His friends helped him find many other fun objects.

Trip also loves the musical Itsy Bitsy Spider book that he received from his Great-Granny V. It plays the music as soon as you open the book so he likes to try to sing along and do the motions

"Washed the spider out!"

R Week- Reading at the Library

With reading on the list for our letter of the week activities, I decided it was time to take Trip on his first visit to the library. We went in the late morning and found the tiny children's section deserted, which made me very happy. He was quite excited to be there and didn't want to keep his voice down.

We sat down at the little table and looked through some board books. This one with babies showing different expressions was his favorite. We read it several times.

Trip was briefly interested in the puzzle, but then found a spaceship and dump truck on a shelf with a few other toys, making him quickly loose sight of everything else.

Before we left, he spotted "Llama Llama Red Pajama" displayed with the new books. This is a favorite of his at home so it was fun for him to see it at the library. We immediately had to get it down and read it.

Our visit only lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes, but it was a great start. Trip has mentioned the library once since then, so we'll have to go back soon.

Favorite Book: Eating the Alphabet

Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A-Z by Lois Ehlert was a favorite book of mine in the classroom and is now a favorite of Trip's as well. For a while, we were reading it multiple times a day upon his request.

It's a very simple book with fruits and/or vegetables for each letter of the alphabet. The letters are presented in both upper and lower case, which I like. The names of the fruits and vegetables are written in both forms as well. This book is fun for children of all ages since it contains some produce that is familiar, and others that they may never have heard of or tried. Toddlers like this book because there are plenty of foods that they recognize and can name.


For older children, there is a glossary in the back that gives information about each of the fruits and vegetables featured in the book.


In the future, it might be fun to make a chart of which items we have eaten and which ones we haven't. We could then try to find some of the things that we have never tasted before to find out if we like them.