One of our summer activities is to participate in Reading Confetti‘s Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids! Each month she chooses a different author and participants read one of his/her books and do an activity related to the book. This month’s author is Mo Willems. We love Mo Willems here and ended up reading, and rereading, 4 of his books last week–The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, and Pigs Make Me Sneeze! Such great reads, we definitely recommend all of them!
Once of the most reread books was Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. It’s the story of a naked mole rat who likes to wear clothes. In fact he likes to wear clothes so much he opened his own shop. His clothes-wearing makes the other mole rats very uncomfortable and they take the issue to Grand-pah for consideration. You’ll have to read it yourself to see how it ends, but I will go out on a limb and predict you’ll love it.
They loved the idea of the naked mole rat getting dressed and wanted to make their own mole rat to dress up. The 6 year old drew a naked mole rat on construction paper and we laminated it so we could reuse it.
Then the kids got to work! They made tons of play dough clothes and accessories for our naked mole rat. Including a light saber!
After they had all the socks and sandwiches and shirts and light sabers they needed it was time to dress him up!
They used the play dough props to reenact parts of the story and to role play how the mole rat should react to his friends when they don’t like that he wears clothes. All without any prompting from me.
Doing crafts and activities to go along with a book not only increases your child’s enjoyment of the story it helps develop their comprehension skills and allows them to better internalize the author’s message. The activities don’t have to be elaborate or “pinnable”, it’s the simple activities that are can be the most loved. Especially, when kids are given the chance to do them over and over and over again.
Linking up to:
Make sure to check it out to see all of the Mo Willems book and activity ideas that other bloggers come up with this month!
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While we were busy creating mole rat clothes out of play dough the folks at The Imagination Tree, Sun Hats and Wellie Boots, and Nurturestore were hosting a play dough play date! Stop by to see TONS of great play dough recipes, why playing with play dough is important, and lots of fun ways to add play dough into your play.
