Oodles of Animals by Lois Ehlert {Book-based Craft}

Can't make it to the zoo? Then I suggest you check out Oodles of Animals by Lois Ehlert. In this book your child will meet lots of animals beautifully crafted out of paper shapes, not to mention learn a little bit about each in rhyming text that is quite poetic.

I thought it might be fun to attempt to make our own paper cut-out animal in the style of Lois Ehlert. So I asked baby bookworm to select an animal she would like to make. She chose the butterfly (I guess she's all girl after all). Then I let her pick the colors she wanted to use, and we rounded up our materials for the craft:

Our Materials

• Scissors (we used adult, child, and "fancy")
• glue (we used Elmers and a paint brush for application, but a stick would be fine too)
• Googly eyes (optional)
• Colored paper 
• Sequence & glitter for decoration

Creating our shape butterfly

I used the book as a guide and cut out various shapes that could be assembled easily into a butterfly. While I was cutting out the shapes with the "fancy" scalloped scissors and "adult" scissors, I let baby bookworm practice cutting on her own with her child-safe scissors (this was just to keep her occupied). 

Then, I guided her with questions such as "What shape is this?" or "Where do you think the diamond goes?"  as we placed the shapes together to make a butterfly. Last, she decorated the butterfly with sequence. 

I thought this was a cute activity to reinforce some of the shape and color concepts from the book. Hope you have fun creating your own animals!

Teachable Moments are Everywhere, Even at Red Mango

This post comes with a warning. If you try Red Mango frozen yogurt - you WILL become addicted.

Of course, I kid. Sort of.

A few weeks ago baby bookworm and I went to a blogger event at Red Mango, a new frozen yogurt shop in the lovely town of Wayne, PA.........and I. Was. Hooked. I went to Red Mango about 5 times the week of the event! Should I be embarrassed to admit that? I really don't have an addictive personality, I swear. Their frozen yogurt is on another level, and for whatever reason I had to have it, very often.

Since then, it's actually become one of our favorite spots, and it's a "special treat" for baby bookworm that I can feel good about because it's nonfat, all-natural, and contains live and active cultures that are beneficial to your body.

Oh. And I cannot forget that there was also pizza at the event from another new shop, Jules, just down the street from Red Mango. It's all organic and completely delicious. I have also become a regular there, as well!  (I must be an advertisers dream or something).

Now, you might be asking yourself what does this have to do with learning, literacy, and a love of books?!

Everything. Because my "homeschooling" motto is that learning opportunities creep up on you in the most surprising places. An event with pizza and frozen yogurt, sure, is lots of fun! But, the real fun is trying to make teachable moments out of everyday experiences....going to the grocery store, the doctor's office, or just about anywhere.

So how did we create a learning experience out of a yummy blogger event?

Well, for starters we read the book Ice Cream Everywhere!

Technically ice cream and frozen yogurt aren't the same thing, but...to a two-year old they pretty much are. And since I had a difficult time finding a frozen yogurt book, this one seemed perfect since it's fun, and contains lots of rhymes, and repetition. I had baby bookworm point to the words as I read them since the text was short and simple, and then try to identify the words "ice cream" in the text.

As a follow-up activity, we then created our own ice cream cone out of construction paper and glue (super simple). I numbered the pieces and asked her to put them in order. If your child can't identify numbers yet, you could leave them out and go by size alone. This is a really easy and fun activity to practice shapes, numbers, and size.

Finally, baby bookworm and I added a little science to our lesson by reading From Milk to Ice Cream.

The book tells about the process of how ice cream is made from milking the cow all the way through to stocking shelves with ice cream. It's a great science book for the toddler age group, and I definitely recommend it to you if you are looking to make a teachable moment out of your next trip to the ice cream shop or Red Mango.

P.S. If you are in and around the Philly area you can follow Red Mango in Wayne on Facebook or twitter.  If you aren't, Red Mango is a franchise around the country, so you can probably check out their yummy deliciousness near you, too.

Disclosure: We received free pizza and frozen yogurt at this event, but I take full responsibility for my Red Mango addiction.

A Recipe for Learning: Soup Day by Melissa Iwai

One thing that I love to do this time of year is to make a nice, huge pot of soup.  The way the whole house fills with fabulous aromas as the pot simmers is just one of the coziest and comforting feelings I know. 

When I stumbled on Soup Day (Christy Ottaviano Books)by Melissa Iwai at the library, with it's cute and colorful cover page, I kinda got excited to read this book with baby bookworm.  It's a story of a little girl's soup day ritual with her mother - from going to the market to select the best ingredients, to chopping them up into smaller pieces, to hearing the pot sizzle as the oil is poured in, to spending time playing with her mom as they wait for the flavors to develop, to getting to devour the soup that they worked so hard to make. 

This book gives me the same cozy feeling as my soup day (without all the hard work), and what I love the best about this book is that Iwai's invented mother-daughter soup ritual took me back to my childhood and reminded me of the excitement I experienced with my mother when we did something special together. 


At the end of the book there is a recipe for making your very own pot of veggie soup - and I was happy to see that it wasn't too different from mine!

Baby bookworm became instantaneously hooked on this book like I did.  In addition to it just being an all around cute and cuddly book, it also provides a great opportunity to review colors, shapes, and the names of various objects (particularly, the names of vegetables, of course!).  I thought it would be fun to reenact this book, but since baby bookworm is only 23 months, I didn't really feel like dealing with knives and ovens and hot vegetable stock and sizzling oil.  So we did a learning-craft version of this book instead...

Here's what we did:

1) With construction paper I assembeled our ingredients: mushrooms, zucchini, potatoes, parsley, carrots, onions, and celery. 

2) Then I got an empty pickle jar that I had saved and washed; we used this as our "pot". 

3) As we read the book, we followed their "recipe" step by step for making veggie soup.

Baby bookworm telling me what to put into the pot!

4) We counted the number of pieces of each ingredient that we added to our pot

5) I wrote up our version of veggie soup on a little index card

Baby bookworm had a blast with this activity and we pretty much "played" it every day for a week!  Give it a try yourself - it's a great, easy, toddler-friendly way to follow directions, learn new vocabulary, practice counting, shapes, colors, and it also builds language through pretend play!

An Easy School Bus Project to Help Teach Shapes, Colors, and Counting

I'm happy to introduce my very first guest post, written by Ms Maria who has been a preschool teacher for nearly 30 years.  She has taught in a private preschool setting and for the Head Start program. 

Today she shares with us a quick lesson that she uses in her classroom to help strengthen young childrens' knowledge of colors, shapes, and counting.

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In my classroom I use this activity with the children to introduce several learning concepts in the same lesson. 

We begin by reading a Donald Crews book called School Bus.  It tells of the travels of school buses in the course of a day.  It is a book that I generally read at the beginning of the school year since children are just becoming accustomed to riding the big yellow bus all on their own.

Following the story, we do a school bus project that incorporates math skills.

What you will need to do this project:
1. Black, red, yellow, blue, and green construction paper
2. Scissors
3. A glue stick

Prior to doing the project with your students or child, you will need to cut the yellow paper into the shape of a bus.  Then cut out 1 blue rectangle for the door of the bus; cut out 2 black circles for the wheels; cut out 3 green squares for windows; cut out 4 small red triangles for lights.  If your child is older you can also add an octagon for the stop sign.

Once you have everything cut out, you can then begin the project with the child.  The child will glue each object onto the yellow bus.  While doing so, ask the child a few questions such as: "Where does the door belong?" or "Where do the wheels go?" 

Don't forget to review the colors and shapes of each object with your child, and to count everything as you go along!

A school bus project that teaches colors, shapes, and counting

You can even follow up the activity with another story.  My favorite is Wheels on the Bus because my students enjoy it so much.

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Happy learning everyone!